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This document is authorized for use only by Alhadi Altayeb at Alhosn University until June 2013. Copying or posting
is an infringement of copyright. Permissions@hbsp.harvard.edu or 617.783.7860.

EXECUTIVE FOCUS

Human resource management in a global
environment: Keys for personal and organizational
success: An interview with Eliza Hermann

Catherine M. Dalton

Kelly School of Business, Indiana University, 1309 East 10th Street, Bloomington, IN 47405—1701, USA

Eliza Hermann is Vice President Human Resources
Strategy at BP plc, based in London, England. In
1986, her career in the energy business began when
she joined Amoco Corporation, where she earned a
series of promotions in the international oil busi-
ness which exposed her to markets ranging from
Argentina to Azerbaijan. She was a member of the
team involved in the successful integration of
Amoco when BP acquired the company in 1998.
During the past several years at BP, she has served
as Manager, Strategy and Business Transformation-
Global Aromatics, leading a team responsible for
strategic planning and business development in the
company’s Petrochemical segment, and more
recently as Vice President, Human Resources for
BP’s global Gas, Power, and Renewables segment.
Throughout her career, Ms. Hermann has traveled
extensively, with particular focus on Asia, Western
Europe, North America, South America, Russia, and
the republics of the former Soviet Union.

Ms. Hermann holds a Master of Business Admin-
istration (MBA) degree from the Kelley School of
Business, Indiana University and a Bachelor of Arts
degree in social and behavioral sciences from Johns
Hopkins University. She serves on the board of
directors of Brightpoint, Inc., where she is Chair-
person of the Compensation and Human Resources
Committee, as well as a member of the Corporate
Governance and Nominating Committee.

doi:10.1016/j.bushor.2005.01.003

E-mail address: bushor@indiana.edu.

Business Horizons (2005) 48, 193 — 198

www.elsevier.com/locate/bushor

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This document is authorized for use only by Alhadi Altayeb at Alhosn University until June 2013. Copying or posting
is an infringement of copyright. Permissions@hbsp.harvard.edu or 617.783.7860.

I recently had the opportunity to talk with Ms.
Hermann about her experiences in human resources
at BP and Amoco, as well as her experience as a
corporate board member with Brightpoint. During
our conversation, she shared her reflections on the
centrality of human resources in major strategic
initiatives, and her belief in the power of mentor-
ing as a means for ensuring a flow of talent within a
company.

Business Horizons: Firstly, thank you for taking
the time to share your thoughts with our reader-
ship at Business Horizons. I would like to begin
our conversation with your career at Amoco. I
suspect it would be fair to say that the oil
industry is, and was, a relatively non-traditional
industry for a freshly-minted MBA, yet alone a
woman, when you joined Amoco in 1986. As a
result, what attracted you to Amoco and the oil
industry, more generally?

Eliza Hermann: Actually, most major energy
companies hire a number of new MBAs each year
because business acumen and commercial skills are
critical in this industry, along with science and
technical skills. What may have been more unusual
was the hiring of women. There were certainly not
a lot of woman in the industry in the early days and,
frankly, even today it is fairly male-dominated.

How did you choose Amoco out of your many
options when graduating with your MBA?

The simple truth is that Amoco chose me. Toward
the end of my first year in the MBA program, a
representative from Amoco called the Business
Placement Office about hiring a summer intern;
someone with knowledge about labor relations. I
had such experience, so following a phone interview
with an Amoco representative, I was hired and spent
a summer interning in Chicago with the company. I
really enjoyed the job and was impressed with my
colleagues and the leadership that I met. I returned
to Bloomington for the second year of the MBA
program with a job offer in my pocket for when I
finished the program. While I did interview a bit
more broadly during my second year, I was fairly
certain I would return to Amoco, and I did.

That certainly speaks very well of Amoco that
you were so certain that you would return to the
company full-time following your internship
experience.

It was a very good experience interning with
Amoco, and the single biggest factor why I

wanted to go back was definitely the people.
Also, I was attracted to Amoco because it was
such a global business, and I’d been interested in
international business as early as the seventh or
eighth grade.

It sounds like you knew very early what career
path you wished to pursue. You have had an
extensive and highly successful career in human
resources management. Did you always know
that you were interested in human resources
and, if so, what attracted you to this area of
business?

When I was a sophomore in college at Johns
Hopkins University in Baltimore, I had not yet
decided what I would pursue as a career. To help
defray college costs, I took a part-time job as a
reader for a blind man who worked for the
National Labor Relations Board, the government
agency that handles union relations in the U.S.
The job entailed making audio tapes that he
could listen to, and I became fascinated by the
material that I was reading to him, which
included labor law cases and other labor research
and journal articles. This job opened my eyes to
labor relations, which I had not previously heard
much about. I ended up working part-time for
the NLRB for two years and, through that
experience, realized that labor relations was
but a small part of a larger arena called human
resources, which I then became very interested
in. Later on, my rationale for going back to
business school was to earn an MBA and deepen
my business knowledge, so that I could launch my
career in corporate HR.

There is much discussion about the differences
between line and staff jobs in organizations.
Within this discussion, how would you characterize
the importance of HR in organizations?

Without people, most businesses wouldn’t be in
business. HR focuses on driving much greater
organizational and human capability and effective-
ness for bottom-line business benefit.

With BP’s acquisition of Amoco, you had the
opportunity to experience in real time one of the
more important corporate strategic changes organ-
izations might experience. As you know, a merger/
acquisition in some fashion affects everyone in
both organizations. Can you share your thoughts on
the role that you believe HR played in the
successful integration of Amoco into the BP corpo-
rate structure?

EXECUTIVE FOCUS194

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This document is authorized for use only by Alhadi Altayeb at Alhosn University until June 2013. Copying or posting
is an infringement of copyright. Permissions@hbsp.harvard.edu or 617.783.7860.

One of the key success factors was very tight
project management of all aspects of the deal,
including the people aspects. For example, in HR
we laid out a staffing process that started at the
top of the company and cascaded down from there
on a schedule, so that people would find out their
new status as quickly as possible. In such situations,
you don’t want people living in an uncomfortable
area of uncertainty for any longer than absolutely
necessary. We worked very fast in the first two
years or so to integrate or harmonize all the various
people processes, or design new ones where we
needed to. For example, the performance appraisal
process, the job posting process, how people are
treated; anything that was directly touching or
affecting employees we worked very hard to get
sorted out quickly. We also led a lot of change
management work to help people cope with
change. These were some of the areas of HR’s
contribution.

Was the acquisition particularly hard on Amoco
employees, as they were acculturated into the BP
system?

I think this varied by employee. There were
some people who saw the acquisition as a really
good thing, offering new opportunities. Others
immediately saw it as a negative; being bought by
a non-American company, people who might have
been senior in the old headquarters in Chicago and
knew they could never move. It was much more an
individual set of reactions. There were also a lot of
the classic stories about people leaving, either at
the time of the acquisition or within the first two
years after the acquisition. Lots of people left.

And these were not necessarily the people that
you would want to leave, were they?

Most definitely not.

With your permission, I’d also like to talk about
HRM in general, training in particular. There is
considerable discussion and debate in the field of
human resources management about the impor-
tance of training and how to make training bstick;Q
how to ensure that training is effective. Would you
mind sharing your thoughts on the training func-
tion and how to ensure that organizational training
is effective?

Firstly, I would probably reframe the question more
broadly as overall learning and development. Training
implies training classes. I don’t know if you intend to
focus on training classes or the broader arena.

Thank you for the opportunity to clarify. Let’s
focus on the broader arena.

OK. My belief is that the best way to actually
make learning stick, whether it originates in the
classroom or not, is to reinforce it. One of the best
reinforcements is to be sure to apply it at work,
quickly and frequently. And it is certainly helpful if
there is a supervisor, peer, or colleague who is
actively involved in helping the person apply the
new learning effectively: giving feedback and
follow-on coaching as needed, or just being a
sounding board. So, I’d say those are two significant
reinforcers that help make training effective. With
regard to measuring effectiveness of training, this
is very difficult, particularly for knowledge work,
leadership, or behavioral skills.

Another belief about training is that it is not
necessarily about the classroom experience or
training experience itself, but also the opportu-
nity to network with other individuals.

Absolutely. I am a huge believer in networking.
And networking could be internal to a corporation
or broadly external across many organizations.
Either could be really important, depending on
what the learning goal is.

Internal networks are good for learning within an
organization, especially in a large company like BP.
This is one thing BP does really well compared to
others companies I’ve touched. Obviously, we are
huge, we are global, we are very dispersed physi-
cally, but there are mechanisms that enable the
creation of global communities of interest or
communities of practice, to share learning, knowl-
edge, and processes.

One aspect of your career that has almost
certainly enabled a rich variety of learning oppor-
tunities is your extensive experience with interna-
tional travel while with Amoco and, subsequently,
BP. What do you think has been the greatest
benefit you have realized from these experiences
in non-domestic markets?

You learn pretty quickly that there is no one right
way culturally, or what works well in one country or
culture isn’t going to work well in another. Cultural
context is everything in the practice of HR. You
develop a pretty quick appreciation for other peo-
ples’ beliefs and practices and how things get done.

One school of thought with regard to organ-
izational structure and design is that the more
decentralized the organization, for example, a

EXECUTIVE FOCUS 195

decentralized organization such as BP, the more
important it is at a corporate level to under-
stand these cultural issues. Would you agree?

That’s an interesting theory. I’m not sure that
centralization/decentralization would make a dif-
ference in that.

Is it simply that it is a good guideline to be
culturally sensitive, regardless of how the company
is structured?

Yes, I think at any multi-country or multi-
national organization, sensitivity to local cultural
context is going to be crucially important to the
success of the business.

Extensive international travel such as yours
undoubtedly brings with it some challenges. What
are some of the more notable challenges, either
personal or corporate, you have faced operating in
such a wide variety of global markets?

With a Western, capitalistic decision making
approach, it is very easy to think that other cultures
or people in other countries should make decisions
based on the same thinking around economics that
we would, when in fact their negotiating positions
might be driven by quite different needs or value
sets. So what’s uneconomic to us might be economic
to them, or vice versa. One example might be
Azerbaijan in the very early 1990s. Azeri leaders put
an economic value on access to great training
outside of their own country, whereas historically
we might not have seen access to training as a big
negotiating lever in constructing the terms of a
deal. Another example more common in certain
Asian cultures is the whole issue of saving face. This
could become even more important than dollars and
cents type thinking in certain situations. Another
example involves the purpose of a meeting. Quite
often, we may think the purpose of a meeting is to
make a decision, but there are cultures where the
purpose of the meeting is more a matter of form.
The decision will already have been made before-
hand, which then drives a lot of different meeting
behaviors. If you are operating on the wrong
assumption at the wrong moment, it’s quite difficult
to interpret the meeting behavior. Respect for
hierarchy is another example. In some cultures,
this is a big behavioral driver. A subordinate might
never openly, in a group setting, speak up unless
agreeing with what the boss said.

You have been able to apply your HR expertise
not only as a senior executive, but more recently

as a corporate director for a company involved in
multiple country markets. In fact, you are part of a
trend of corporations actively seeking specialized
expertise, particularly in the area of human
resources, for the board of directors. How have
you found your experience as a corporate board
member at Brightpoint?

The ability to apply my HR technical/func-
tional expertise on Brightpoint’s board of direc-
tors is tremendously gratifying. I feel I am able
to contribute not only my HR skills, but also in
the area of coaching for better organizational
effectiveness.

Do you find that HR has historically been an
under-represented area on corporate boards?

My sense is that there are not large numbers
of HR professionals on corporate boards, although
I don’t have any factual data on this. If HR
people are under-represented, the one thing that
does surprise me is that with all of the increased
focus on CEO pay, there wouldn’t be more of a
call for HR or compensation experts. But, then
again, boards can hire these individuals as
consultants.

I would agree. Historically, boards have simply
hired this type of expertise and have therefore
concluded that such expertise or guidance is not
needed on the board on an ongoing basis. In some
respects, that is not misguided thinking from the
perspective that it is good practice in the current
governance environment that the board hire out-
side experts to provide context for critical board
decisions.

It is interesting thinking. If you think about big
construction engineering projects, who oversees
and manages the whole contract with the outside
engineering firm? Someone who knows engineering,
of course. So it is interesting in the matter of
compensation and compensation consultants that
there might be some benefit in having someone
manage that process who knows something about
it, who can offer unique insight on the basis of solid
experience in that area.

Speaking of the issue of compensation, con-
gratulations on your appointment last year as
Chairperson of the Compensation and Human
Resources Committee at Brightpoint. Within that
role, what do you see as the critical issues for an
effective Compensation and Human Resources
Committee?

EXECUTIVE FOCUS196

Executive pay and succession planning.

A crucial aspect of human resource planning is
effectively managing succession processes. Do you
believe most organizations are effective at succes-
sion planning?

My assertion is that most are probably not as
effective as they could be.

What would make them more effective?

The whole practice of succession planning has
to be fully integrated into everything else to do
with leadership performance assessment, leader-
ship talent identification, assessment of upward
potential, and leadership development. It all has
to be one integrated approach that the top
leadership takes very seriously as the backbone
of their people process. This means it also has to
be fully integrated with the business performance
management process, of course. The important
thing is that it is central; that it is integrated
into the overall core business processes of the
enterprise.

I would think that a key aspect of successful
succession planning is effective mentoring of
succession candidates.

In terms of leadership development, or
employee development in any sense, I believe
mentoring and coaching are very effective tactics.

Do you find that organizations effectively
engage in mentoring and coaching?

I think that even the best organizations can
probably do more. Fundamentally, I think that
every supervisor, every team leader, everyone
who is a manager of other human beings, as a
part of their formal job should be coaching and
mentoring the people who work for them. I think
we have separated the concept of mentoring
from that of coaching, and now think of mentor-
ing as outside the reporting relationship, which is
just a different form of coaching, or a different
form of providing someone who is a sounding
board or a source of advice or guidance. A lot of
companies have effective mentoring programs.
But I think that a formal mentoring program is
never going to be 100% of the solution because
the best mentoring relationships are often based
on the chemistry and the relationship between
the individuals, and you can’t ever formally
arrange that.

What advice would you give to someone looking
for a coach or mentor?

The starting place is to look at one’s professional
network and think about who you already know or
who you already talk with in a professional context,
inside or outside the organization, and enhance the
relationship. Ask the person for advice or feedback
on the particular issue. I see it as a very organic
process as opposed to bOK, now we’re going to go
into our mentoring conversation for the next 10
minutes.Q I see it much more as something that is
just a part of everyday life.

There is a distinction between informal mentor-
ing, which I think is actually much more powerful,
and formal mentoring, which is formal programs
where people are paired together and matched up.
BP has a formal mentoring program; in fact, several
of them. One of the more novel formal programs
that I’ve participated in is reverse mentoring,
where someone more senior is paired up with
someone very junior, say a year or two out of
university, and the senior individual is the mentee
and gets to learn from the more junior person their
issues and concerns from their perspective.

That sounds like a fascinating program. Our
readers might enjoy hearing about how the reverse
mentoring program works at BP.

It is voluntary on either person’s part. Both the
more senior people and the more junior people can
volunteer if they would like to be paired up and
participate. It is a formal program, so there is a
structure built around it that lasts about a year. The
pairings are made by someone in HR and the process
is deliberately set out to have as diverse pairings as
possible. I participated two years ago. My mentor
was a 20-something Azerbaijani accountant who
was working in London for a couple of years to
better develop his financial skills. He was very
bright and had a deeply inquiring mind. We had a
good year. There were a couple of blunch and learnQ
sessions put on by the organizers; otherwise, we
were left to our own devices to meet roughly every
two months. I got some insight as to what he was
thinking and what he was concerned about, and it
was a very different mentoring experience.

What were your and your mentor’s individ-
ual goals in entering this reverse mentoring
experience?

For him, to learn more about how someone more
senior looked at the organization and looked at
career development, in particular. Insight into how

EXECUTIVE FOCUS 197

BP decision-making works, how things actually get
done. For me, as with all of the senior participants,
to get the insight into how a more junior person
would look at the organization.

You are clearly quite passionate about mentor-
ing. Have you found other ways to serve as a
mentor?

In BP, I am often asked if I will mentor others. I
would say at any given time that I am mentoring
around a dozen HR people. Some of these have been
identified by us, the leadership of the HR function,
as having significantly higher potential. But, in
other cases, it may just be more junior people
who I’ve come into contact with or who simply want
a more senior mentor. I also mentor some Indiana
University Kelley School of Business MBA students,
two at the moment, although I keep in touch with
two or three others who have already graduated.
With the latter, it is not a program anymore, but a
relationship that has carried on past the formal
mentoring.

In either your formal or informal roles as a
mentor, what do you find to be the most satisfying
aspect of being a mentor?

When it is truly a two-way relationship where
there is real conversation and collegial advice-
giving in both directions. It’s also very satisfying
seeing these people get ahead in their careers,
seeing them do what they want to do.

Through your mentoring experiences, you have
undoubtedly facilitated others’ career successes.
What is it that you believe has enabled your own
success as an HR professional?

There are certain elements of what I do that I am
really passionate about, and because of this, I put a
lot of energy, effort, and dedication into my job. In
particular, I care very deeply about helping other
people develop and get ahead in their careers,
particularly professional women.

Have you relied on mentors throughout your
career and, if so, how have they helped you
professionally?

I’ve had lots of mentors, former bosses, and
other senior colleagues with whom I’ve worked
over the years. I’d say the people who I think of
most actively as a coach or mentor to me now are a
relatively small number of people: three, four, or
five, and the frequency of our conversations varies
widely. It’s definitely not on a schedule and it’s not
a formal process.

When you do interact with them, is it because a
specific issue has arisen and you would like their
help?

It is more like a sounding board, in my case. It is
because I want to run something past them and
have them think about it from their perspective
and think about different alternatives.

If you were tasked with mentoring your succes-
sor, what advice would you offer that individual?

Recognize up front the amount of time and
attention to organizational politics, the informal
systems and processes that influence so much about
how things actually get done in an organization.
Leaders need to cultivate the skill of navigating an
organization so that they can be the best engineer,
the best HR person, or the best finance person in
the world. Without the knowledge, skill, and
inherent curiosity about how to work with people
and get things through an organization, they are not
going to achieve their full potential.

Politics, by the way, is not a bad thing. Any
enterprise has its own political system, if we can
call it that. But, I think what makes the difference
is the curiosity and the inquiry to learn how the
political system works.

Thank you so much for your time and willingness
to share your thoughts with Business Horizons’
readers.

EXECUTIVE FOCUS198

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