Christian Magnet is the Vice President Finance at BD in Vaud, Switzerland. He has been with the business for almost 17 years, having previously spent more than 12 years at Chevron. Christian started his Finance career as an Auditor at PwC. 

Which is the most important quality for your role today: Personal performance or delivering through a team?

When I look at my current role, the most important quality is the team. This is because I realise that you can only be as good as your team. So, when I look at the time I’m spending on coaching and mentoring, it’s a very big part of my agenda. Every month, I have a one-on-one with my different direct reports, and we go through a structured discussion around their performance, their challenges and their development.

I have seen a lot of value in developing successors, and we have a list of talent pools within my organisation. Whenever we have someone promoted or someone moving to a different position outside of Finance, or outside of the company, we typically have good successors lined up already. That helps a lot in the overall performance delivery of the Finance function of my team, because we don’t have vacancies for a very long time.

To answer your question, it’s important to be a very strong business partner. To be a very strong business partner, I need a very strong team behind me. I noticed, over the years, as I have progressed in the organisation, that spending time on developing the team was really the key to success in a role like mine.

How important is it to select the best possible team?

In terms of selection, we have developed a pretty strong assessment tool. At BD, we focus a lot on diversity. That’s something that I have noticed, in the last few years, brings a lot of value to the team, and trying to have a good gender balance. In my team today, I have about 40-45% of female talent, and I see the benefit of having that gender balance.

Additionally, what is important for me, leading Finance for the EMEA region, is to have good representation from different nationalities. I have about 16 direct reports from about 12 different nationalities. When we have decision-making sessions or problem-solving sessions, I see a lot of value in having diversity in gender, culture, age and nationality.

One of the first things I’m looking at when I have a vacancy is: What is my diversity agenda at the moment?”, “Do I need to look for different talent or similar talent?” That’s one of the first things I consider. What I’m asking my executive search team is to come with a diverse slate; I want to see female and male talents, I want to see different nationalities, and then - from that - we select the best.

To select the best, we are using a couple of things. We have what we call “the BD way”, which is basically all about what our values and leadership commitments are, what our mindset is, and there are a few things there that help to understand if the people or the talent will fit well with the BD culture. The second element that I found even more important is, I’m basing my selection more on potential for the future, rather than for making sure the person has all the skillset to fit the role.

Already, at that stage, we are looking at the potential for the future. My boss is always saying that, if you have high potential and agility to learn new things, they can learn everything. I am looking more for the change management, the ability to adapt to new things, and the ability to work with different models. If they show that they have already managed to work in a complex operating model, had to manage change, that is a good sign for me, which suggests they could adapt to the BD Finance operating model.

What current recruitment challenges do you face?

As I said at the very beginning, we’ve managed - over the last five or ten years - to be a very robust succession pipeline, so I’m currently not faced with having vacancies for former direct reports that I cannot fill internally.

But, we have a few roles where you need a very specific skillset, for example, once you go to a Country Controller role, you need not only the language, but also the local gap skillset, which typically - as we move to this centre of excellence model - in some countries, we might face challenges with a pretty dry pipeline there.  

However, you can find good talent on the market, so it didn’t take us too long to find the right talent for the position I had in France. I’m looking at their career, what type of challenges those people had to face, etc., so I’m more looking at the potential again. And I can be industry agnostic, which makes the talent pool bigger.

Where we face challenges is more at the lower level, and this is something that we want to build for the future of Finance. The new skillset I see that would be required is around data and digitalisation. Finance is not the only one looking for those talents, so, when you think about Data Scientists, they are very rarely on the market, and it’s hard to build up from internal talent.

The next transformation of Finance is really digital, and we want to be ready for that. We are basically looking to recruit more people around data mining, Data Scientists, things like that, which Marketing is looking for, as well. That is where we face some challenges, as there are fewer people attracted to the lower level roles.

What really excites you about working for BD?

I mentioned “the BD way”, so the BD values. I really joined BD for those values in the healthcare industry. I feel energised every morning to come to the office or to work from home - because we are working a lot more from home these day - and really energised by the purpose of BD advancing the world of health.

When you think about whatever you do, even in Finance, at the end, there is a patient that you can help; it gives you a lot more energy. That’s what excites me about BD and, when I joined, that was what I was looking for.

And then I stay with BD because of the people, because of this culture that you infuse in the organisation, where you respect each other and really accept responsibilities – they’re the type of things that we are really driving. It’s really rewarding to hear the new joiners coming from outside saying through the interviews, “I felt those values”, and it’s amazing to see how true it is because, after six months, I really feel it.

That’s a very important part of BD, those values and the purpose. This is really a purpose-driven company. It’s not only on posters that you see it, it’s really something that you can feel every day when you’re working for BD.

How do you see the Swiss economy evolving in the next five years?

When you look at the level of inflation around the world and compare it the amount of inflation in Switzerland, the Swiss inflation level is much lower. From that, you can see that this is a pretty resilient economy, so I see a lot of positive outcomes for the Swiss economy.

I think the big asset of Switzerland is the talent that you can find here. On many different aspects, from Finance to Marketing to R&D, there’re a lot of very talented people on the market, which is similar to what I said about being successful. I think, as a country, you are only successful as long as you have educated and very talented people, along with a variety of start-ups to show that you’re dynamic.

What risks have you taken throughout your career and how did they help you get to the level you’re now at?

When I joined BD, I think I took a risk. I was working for Chevron, so oil and gas, and I was about to move to the US to take additional responsibilities, but I realised that I wanted to move into a different industry - especially healthcare.

The opportunity I had at BD was based in a different location, so I had to move my family to a different country. That was a personal risk, because when you have young kids, you have to think about whether they are going to manage the change. My wife was working and had to find a new job. I felt very good about BD, as I mentioned, about the values, about the people, but you never know if it’s going to be successful - so that’s one risk.

Once you start moving outside of your comfort zone - moving into a different industry, into a different job, different company, etc. - you develop yourself the most.

Within BD, I was humble enough, but ambitious, and I was open to accept different positions within Finance at the same level, and the same salary most of the time. That was the right thing to do, as I learned a lot. People saw me in different positions, and I felt I could go and take more responsibility in the job, which helped me a lot.

What advice would you give to aspiring leaders?

Next week, we are organising what we call the career day within my organisation. Every year, we are trying to focus one day for talent. We do a face-to-face meeting with all my direct reports, and we talk about careers in Finance in BD, and we show them examples of leaders and how they have advanced their career. We also ask business leaders to come to say what their expectation from Finance is.

We also give them tips and tricks on how to build your career, personal branding... One of the things I’m always telling them is to be curious, as curiosity for me is a great asset when you want to progress your career. Don’t be afraid to move into an area where the business or the country is struggling, or where you have a bad situation, because if you are offered those opportunities, that means that the company feels you can fix it. If you fix it, it’s a great asset, a great impact you have, and it’s going to be great for your future.

The other thing is what I said about moves. Everybody is very ambitious and wants to go up all the time; sometimes you need to be a bit patient and take the time to move in different positions that really build up your skillset for the future. Once there is another position vacant, you will certainly be in the best position to take it if you have shown you already manage to do a lot of different things. It shows your ability to adapt to new jobs and it gives you a chance to show how much of an impact you can have.

At a certain level, I’m always telling people that - before you move - there are two things you need to work on. One is making sure you can show the impact you had, and the second one is to build a succession pipeline.

For me, it’s always a challenge when I have a leader who is a good leader and shows that they could have an impact moving to a different position and there is no successor ready yet. So, I am asking all my direct reports to build a succession pipeline, so they have a solution for their leader when they want to move.

What’s the most surprising thing that’s happened during your career?

I am not sure it’s surprising, but I was a bit sceptical around all the change management techniques and so on. We went through a major transformation at BD for Finance back in 2015-2016, where we moved from a very general kind of team decentralised. We had people in countries doing FP&A, doing Accounting altogether.

We moved to a very specialised organisation, where you have expertise in FP&A, Accounting, etc., and we also centralised most of this in the centre of excellence and in shared services. 

It was a major change that was necessary, because of the size of BD; it’s much more of an efficient model. We all agreed that it was the right thing to do, but we went through a methodology to manage change, which worked very well.

We managed those changes without major disruption for the business. So, I feel sometimes we need to trust the process and the methodologies and really build on that, but you need to be very disciplined around it.

What is the future of Finance?

The future of Finance is around digitalisation. I’m talking about the next transformation of Finance, because I felt that - in large organisations - everybody is now more or less organised around centralisation. You have shared services, and centres of excellence, and staff supporting the business. For me, it’s what do we do now around digitalisation? We are working on that and we identified that it is three main elements.

One is around advanced analytics. Beyond advanced analytics, you have reporting using an advanced tool, like Power BI, and it gives a very different experience for your business partner. Instead of having static reports, you have a dynamic dashboard, meaning you have one page where you can drill down on the details, instead of having another ten different slides to understand what is going on.

Another part of advanced analytics is what we call predictive analytics - you can use that in artificial intelligence to help you in the financial forecast, for instance, with a learning machine. We are piloting that at the moment in one of our businesses and it’s pretty promising.

The third element is more around compliance and fraud prevention. We are using some of those tools. For instance, for expense notes, with the number of employees, it’s impossible to check all of them. But, if you have machines that are doing that, filtering things, they support the areas that you need to manually check. That’s also something that we want to leverage, to do checking on accounts when you close the books, etc., making sure there are no mistakes in what you report. 

Our auditors are using that to audit most of the transactions. In the past, they were doing samples and then basing their opinion on the sample. Now, basically 100% of entries are audited.

Another part is automation. We are already using robotics for some of our transactions. I think we can go much further, like using technology to help on accounts reconciliation, for instance, which is a very manual process at the moment.

That’s what I see for Finance, really trying to automate or enhance some of the manual works that we are doing today, but also providing more qualitative data to the business, so we can make better business decisions - and faster.

Thank you to Christian for speaking to John Bower, Director in our Finance & Accoutancy recruitment team in Switzerland.

Views and opinions contained within our Executive Interviews are those of the interviewee and not views shared by EMEA Recruitment.