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A:The space industry is constantly undergoing disruption, with new technology breakthroughs occurring every year. We also face well-funded newcomers that are reshaping the industry. To ensure our business can keep pace with the speed at which the industry is evolving, we need to have the skills and capabilities to respond to disruption today, while also predicting where the needs will be in a few years. At SES, we use AI technology and data to continuously assess the skills we currently have and identify what we will need in the future. Succession planning is based on experience, not years of service or job titles. We strategically empower and enable our people to move across different functions and gather relevant experiences. By doing so, we’re able to accrue the internal resources and strong capabilities needed to compete with best-in-class companies and succeed as disruptions emerge.

A:I have lived and worked in 7 countries and speak 5 languages. Each move required adjusting to a new culture, a different language, new ways of working, as well as unique governance and decision-making processes. On the professional side, my career has been built around mergers, acquisitions, and integrations, working with newly acquired businesses and dealing with the typical high levels of post-transaction ambiguity and cultural resistance. From GE Capital to Vodafone and Ericsson, and now at SES, I’ve been through significant change management processes and made hard decisions related to business, people, and culture. I’ve learned along the way that it’s important to listen and learn before making any big decisions. I’ve also learned to be careful about assumptions because they are usually not proven correct. All these experiences across industries and cultures guide my philosophies as an HR leader today.

A:Our people strategy is built on making sure we are ready for the future. This includes ensuring we have the right culture, that we can retain our existing top talent and future leaders, and that we are attractive to the talent we will need to recruit to be successful. At SES, we are building a skills-organization, establishing a culture of continuous learning, and prioritizing leadership development to enable our employees to support the needs of all aspects of our business. As SES continues to transform with a focus on delivering advanced multi-orbit space connectivity solutions, we are building a flexible and agile workforce with the right mix of skills and capabilities to support our business today and adapt quickly as we pursue new opportunities, navigate disruption, and accelerate growth.

A:An effective HR leader operates with humility, acknowledging they may not be the smartest person in the room. Learn as much as you can about the business you support by listening and learning from individuals with more expertise and experience. New and aspiring HR leaders can accelerate career growth immensely by going for the more challenging job, the one that requires them to grow into the position. Take a challenge that sounds and feels big and do everything in your power to succeed. What you experience in one year in that type of role might be worth more than 5 years in a less demanding situation. Finally, while living in different countries is not easy and may not be the right path for everyone, exposure to different cultures and languages can also help you become a more effective HR leader, particularly at a global organization.

A:A future-ready HR function serves as a thought leader for the business, delivering added value by presenting ideas and proposals as to how HR can help the future needs of the company, all before the business even asks for it. This is challenging in a fast-moving industry like space and requires HR leaders to think beyond the basics of technologies, processes, and operations. A future-ready HR team needs to be agile, capable of working at a speed that mirrors the pace of business development. They need to avoid getting stuck repeating the same methods from 3 or 5 years ago. Driving enterprise value means investing the time with experts to truly understand the technical details and inner workings of the business and thinking of oneself not as an HR person, but rather a business leader that happens to have HR expertise.

A:Innovation, commercial success, and building a human-centric culture are overlapping priorities that intersect with and reinforce one another. They should not be viewed as separate entities. HR leaders need to think holistically about how the business operates to effectively balance them equally.