Elise Spangenberg, SVP of People and Culture at Treasury Wine Estates joined ForceBrands’ Senior Director of Client Strategy Rachel Doueck for a recent Women of the Vine and Spirits live chat for corporate members.
The discussion explored leadership trends and retention strategies in beverage alcohol.
Read on to discover some highlights from the conversation with Elise including how to attract, cultivate, and retain high performers, as well as how to showcase your company values through people.
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Attracting and cultivating high performers
The most important thing you can do to attract and cultivate high performers and top talent is to hire and employ high performers — recognize them, reward them, and motivate them, because like attracts like.
And it inspires that high performance internally. People like to be surrounded by high performers.
You should always be scouting talent internally within the organization.
We definitely do this as a leadership team at Treasury through formal programs. We have 360 feedback that we do on an annual basis. We also have talent reviews where you’re assessing talent potential. In addition to the formalized programs, nothing beats the grassroots interaction with your peers and with other departments.
Ensure that you’re always scouting and asking questions, and focusing not just on if you see high potential — someone who’s worth investing in — but also checking in with their leader and seeing how they’re interacting with their peers. See how they’re treating, and maybe people who report into them. I think that’s huge as far as trying to identify them and then cultivating them.
Retaining top talent
Development opportunities I think would be number one. We all know that the number one reason why someone leaves is lack of opportunity so ensure that there is plenty of opportunity. And you don’t have to be a very large organization to be able to implement projects that are maybe cross-functional or challenging assignments.
I know through [the DAOU Vineyards] integration, we were able to give some top performers lead assignments on the integration project and not only is it a challenging piece of work that adds to their portfolio of what they have accomplished, it also gives them exposure.
You want to make sure you’re getting your high potentials exposure internally and externally so that you aren’t the only one who’s investing in them.
Showcasing your company values through people
First and foremost, company values are shown in who you hire, promote, and reward.
The real company values are shown through who you are acknowledging, who you are promoting, and who you are letting go — who you’re holding accountable.
You can have a poster on the wall with all of your values, but it’s in our behaviors. Your team and each other are the biggest ambassadors.
I’m such a fan of being an ambassador of not only the brand, but of the brand as an employer. When you’re sitting at home having a barbecue or talking to your friends about work, what are you saying? And what are you saying about your experience? And is the company doing a good enough job creating an environment where employees speak in a way that attracts other talent?
I think that there are a ton of different ways to go through an acquisition and I have experience only going through one so far. What I can say is that through the acquisition that I’ve experienced, the intentional approach that Treasury has taken has been very unique. They’ve adopted a best-of-both mentality where we have spent several months actually working through the operating model to reimagine how we are structured and set up. We want to ensure that we’re not losing the best of not only just DAOU and what DAOU did that made us so successful but also the best of Treasury.
We’ve also adopted the debate, decide, commit mentality and that has been a lot of fun. I think it helps inspire and bring out the best of both companies.
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