Driving Transformation: Gina-Marie Collignon, SAP’s VP and Head of Marketing, EMEA South, Harnesses the Power of Change Management
“If fortune favors the brave, then SAP is a pretty good example. The German software maker sells business process management tools around the world, and it has spent decades setting the pace that rivals then try to match.
Ask Gina-Marie Collignon what keeps it there and she gives two answers. Collignon is SAP’s Vice-President and Head of Marketing for EMEA South, and she points to diversity in the workplace and to how the company manages change.
Change, for her, isn’t something that happens once and then stops. It goes on all the time. So she starts with the basics. “The most important factor for transformation and change management is that you build everything on trust and openness,” she says.
What makes a good change leader? Empathy, she says. Being able to communicate. Courage. Listening. Collignon calls herself a servant leader, meaning her team, the business stakeholders and the customers come first. SAP runs its own tools to measure trust inside the company, and those numbers back her up: empowerment, engagement, mutual trust and retention scores have all improved.
She also wants people to know why something is changing, not just what. “If you understand the purpose of the change, it helps you understand the outcome and how to best influence it,” she explains. Trust within the team matters too, along with resilience and a willingness to adapt, if the workplace is going to stay healthy and the business is going to grow.
Then there is the practical side. A clear strategy, yes, but also surveys, questionnaires, interviews and design thinking workshops. Collignon likes ideas that come from outside the usual box, and she tells her teams not to fear failure. If something goes wrong, learn from it.
Diversity is the other half of the story. Across EMEA, SAP works in 75 countries and employs people of 86 nationalities, and it treats cultural diversity and gender parity as priorities. “In SAP, we have a commitment to have a high number of [women] leaders in the boardroom, as well as in the workforce,” Collignon says.
Trust, creativity and diversity: that is the mix Collignon and her colleagues at SAP rely on to keep a global business growing and to make the results last.”
