How Korn Ferry helped a global logistics firm find fresh leadership to radically accelerate its Environmental, Health, Safety & Sustainability (EHS&S) program and drive ESG ambitions.
Background
A leading global logistics company
As a global leader in the supply chain and logistics space, this company has tens of thousands of employees spread across 200+ countries and ambitious ESG and Sustainability goals. However, changing mindsets and culture, especially across a very large, distributed, and often transient workforce, is a serious challenge—one that requires focus, persistence and broad stakeholder engagement. As a result, the search for a new EHS&S leader capable of fulfilling the company’s ESG goals promised to be an exacting task.
The Challenge
The search for a practical visionary
The business needed to replace its Environmental, Health, Safety and Sustainability leadership and found itself at an inflection point—what would its future EHS&S leadership look like? How would they lead enterprise-level change across a set of business functions which are critical to all stakeholders but historically have been viewed as individual cost centers? Moreover, within the business there was a keen awareness of the growing public scrutiny and heightened focus on ESG generally, as well as an appreciation of the extremely small pool of suitably experienced leadership candidates.
Recruiting for this role involved other key challenges. A common challenge today is that the best candidates can be in multiple competing hiring processes, many of which are on accelerated timelines. Securing the best talent requires planning, adaptability and the capacity for decisive action.
More specifically, EHS&S leadership within our client’s sector of global logistics requires a clearly defined skillset and experience base. Our client required someone who was not only able to develop ESG strategies at the highest levels, but also able to engage a diverse global workforce on a practical level and deliver real positive change on the ground.
Finally, within the ESG sector, compensation packages have evolved significantly in recent years. Our client found that their compensation package was outdated when compared with current market demands.