Estée Lauder's Tracey Travis Puts Stock in Developing Talent
October 18 2018 - 4:59AM
Dow Jones News
By Ezequiel Minaya
The career of Tracey Travis, finance chief of Estée Lauder Cos.,
proves that a circuitous path through the inner workings of
companies can lead to success as a CFO.
The former General Motors Co. engineer ran plants, distribution
centers, and sales teams for PepsiCo Inc. before leading the
finance team of Ralph Lauren Corp. and rising to the post of senior
vice president of finance at L Brands Inc., parent of Victoria's
Secret and Bath & Body Works. Along the way, she delved into
IT, compliance, investor relations, corporate and brand strategy
and helped turn around struggling divisions.
"The breadth of the responsibilities that I have today were
built on the experiences I had early in my career," Ms. Travis
said.
Her journey is shaping how the New York-based cosmetics giant
attracts and develops finance employees amid stiff competition for
talent in a tight labor market. Central to the effort is the notion
that getting the best from a team often involves placing talented
employees outside their comfort zone.
Ms. Travis this year pushed for the creation of a program that
gives her staff exposure to different areas of finance and
strategy.
"It has proven to be a retention element of how we manage
talent," she told the CFO Journal in an interview.
Through the program, finance employees leave their assigned role
to work with new managers in other areas of the department.
A corporate accountant, for instance, could take an assignment
in the global brand finance team to learn the ins and outs of
tracking consumer behavior. Or an accountant could be assigned to a
regional team to help determine the best location for new stores.
Or the employee might end up in strategy and new business
development looking to fill gaps in the company's brand
portfolio.
Assignments last six to eight months and focus on a project that
aim to occupy roughly 40% of a participant's time. If the program
is successfully completed, an employee could have the opportunity
to swap positions.
The new program is in addition to the more traditional finance
and strategy program tailored to prospective employees who have
just received their master in business administration.
A company program geared toward recent MBA-program graduates was
launched in 2017, also with the backing of Ms. Travis. That program
offers rotations lasting six to 12 months each, offering turns in
business areas that include: brand finance and strategy; regional
and affiliate finance and business management; corporate financial
planning and analysis; treasury; e-commerce and online finance;
research and development finance; supply chain finance; and
investor relations. The M.B.A. program can last up to three
years.
"I had the good fortune of starting in a field role and then
moving to a headquarters role," Ms. Travis said. "So I encourage my
team to do that -- not just within various levels of the finance
organization but cross-functionally as well."
Companies such as General Electric Co., Honeywell International
Inc. and General Motors Co., have long been lauded for developing
financial talent with a combination of training and rapid rotation
of promising executives.
These kinds of programs are becoming more widespread due to a
tight labor market and a workforce that is increasingly accustomed
to hopping between jobs and companies, said James Langston, a
managing director at executive search firm Diversified Search.
"It benefits the company in a great way because you have a much
more versatile finance division," he said. "And it also is a
recruiting tool in this hypercompetitive market for the younger set
who is not interested in being pigeonholed."
The unemployment rate fell in September to 3.7%, a 49-year low.
And finance jobs are particularly hard to fill these days,
executives say.
The number of accounting and auditing jobs, for instance, were
projected to grow 10% between 2016 and 2026, faster that the 7%
growth forecast for all occupations, according to the Bureau of
Labor Statistics.
"Great talent has always been more difficult to source and
certainly with unemployment being as low as it is that creates more
of a challenge, " Ms. Travis said.
The competition for the best finance recruits has become even
more fierce as the department's mission broadens.
"We are increasingly leaning pretty heavily on our finance team
and a few other teams to really manage multiple projects," she
said.
Write to Ezequiel Minaya at ezequiel.minaya@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
October 18, 2018 05:44 ET (09:44 GMT)
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