Perfetti van Melle

An organisation with an open atmosphere that is innovative in many areas

The art of good Leadership

Good leadership is crucial to the success of any enterprise. But what is good leadership? And what is a good manager? The answers to these questions are different for each organisation. Leadership is 'created' by the interplay between a leader and their staff. At Perfetti Van Melle, we now know the importance of proper management in light of monitoring, developing and accelerating leadership.

Since 2006, Perfetti Van Melle has undertaken an extensive employee survey in conjunction with Effectory. Leadership has been closely examined in this survey. ‘Fruitful’ leadership is one of the company objectives of Perfetti Van Melle. The organisation has been making confectionary for over 100 years and continues to go from strength to strength. Perfetti van Melle confections are now available all over the world. Corrie Stolk (HR): "Perfetti Van Melle is an organisation in which you have many opportunities. It is a family business with an international reputation". Following this, Lieke van Aalten, who is responsible for Communications, adds to this that it is “an organisation with an open culture that is innovative in many areas, like HR”. The organisation employs more than a thousand people worldwide.

Research

The reason why Perfetti Van Melle opted for an extensive research staff is explained by Van Aalten: “In 2003/2004 we had to go through extensive reorganisation. It is important to understand the ‘company’s health’ after restructuring the organisation. Moreover, conducting repetition surveys provides us with a good comparison and therefore good trend monitoring. "Perfetti Van Melle has made considerable improvements”. In 2008 the company scored highly for leadership, significantly more than the national average. Compared to the measurement of 2006 when the score was considerably lower, this is quite remarkable. How is this success explained? Stolk: "The success is largely due to the commitment of our managers. Listening to their employees, acting on the acquired signals accurately and facilitating the employees on an individual level is, in my opinion, our best practice solution. Our leaders made decisions in conjunction with their employees. As a result our staff feel that they contribute to the success of the Perfetti van Melle which in turn engages them even more. Our Finance/IT department shared their best practice with other departments which resulted in a very positive energy across the whole organisation."

‘Fruitful’ leadership

As part of their mission, Perfetti Van Melle, have the following vision: Being trendsetters in confectionary. This vision can be linked back to their management style: "fruitful leadership”. Van Aalten,”It is difficult to get one consistent leadership style throughout the company. . In order to measure the “Perfetti van Melle leadership” thoroughly, we decided to include a number of specific questions in the survey that relate to this subject. After performing the survey, we knew exactly where we had to do what. Accordingly , we organised internal training sessions with the General Manager and the Manager of Group Operations who were doing road shows for every single factory.”

A good leader is .....?

Van Aalten and Stolk: "An open, honest manager with integrity who can listen well."

http://www.perfettivanmelle.com