Marcin Miskiewicz is the Global FP&A Director at FrieslandCampina in Amersfoort, the Netherlands. He’s been with the business for over five years, after spending ten years at Danone in multiple Finance roles, and several years with Royal Numico.

Marcin shares advice for someone moving into a global team, the benefits of a career in FMCG, and how to become a responsible leader.

What would be your advice for someone looking to move from a regional to a global role within their organization?

I've made that step at least twice during my career. It’s about recalibrating and developing a global mindset; extending your interest in economic trends and regulations in geo-politics from your region to something broader.

That also requires agility and an openness to learn. Don't assume you know everything, because you don’t; you know the reality to which you’ve been exposed - especially if you lived in a certain geography for three decades. You need to be humble and open to new views, approaches, and business practices.

Equally important is the soft side of management. Build your cross-cultural competencies, as you’ll cooperate with people from different cultures and parts of the world. That requires a different sensitivity, maybe emotional intelligence.

There’s this great book called The Culture Map by Erin Meyer, which has grown in popularity recently. I regret that I have only just read it - 15 or 20 years ago would have been more ideal. It’s a great help for anyone making the move. It’s about not making assumptions and highlighting that even someone very close to you might be very different. You need to be sensitive and try to manage this element.

What is also useful in this journey - even before you make this step - is to involve yourself in global projects. This is how you can learn differences and obtain different perspectives without immediately making the big jump.

For those working within larger international organizations, it’s also about building your network and finding those who will support and advise you during this journey.

To get those roles, you’ve got to put yourself in a place where you're either being asked to do them or you’re asking to do them. Is it a combination of the two that’s given you the opportunity to take on these responsibilities?

Absolutely. It goes both ways. You need to make yourself visible. Of course, having a sponsor is one thing, but showing your face or making yourself known and expressing your interest in certain moves is the second thing.

You can be super good and the best in your region, but if people at headquarters don't know you, it’s very difficult.

What challenges await your business and how do you plan to overcome them?

That’s a very broad question. Being in Finance and FP&A, you see a lot of what is happening in the business across geographies and business lines.

At FrieslandCampina, we are in transition. In late 2023, once the new CEO joined the company, we restructured how we viewed the business with the establishment of seven business groups, each of which has their own distinctive mission.

Refocusing these business groups on their specific missions around growth seems obvious, but we refocused our goals around the performance triangle, which is quite a difficult balance to strike. It’s about winning in the market, becoming more competitive, and establishing our market share position. The second point is around margin expansion, improving our profitability. At the top of the triangle is generating cash while doing it. It seems obvious, but it was good to take a moment and refocus on these elements.

Another element linked to that is looking very critically at our cost structure and implementing savings programs focused on the supply chain. On the other hand, we scaled down our overhead base to improve our margins. That’s the internal part.

Externally, with the significant inflationary pressures experienced over the last few years, we are seeing consumers moving towards private labels, abandoning big brands, and putting pressure on market share. This is a big challenge. In the end, we are cooperative. We are owned by farmers and our role is to valorize milk and increase its value. If the demand and volume is slowing down, we need to manage this as the milk is coming our way 24 hours a day.

In this environment, innovation and sustainability is very important, because that's how you should drive value for the customer and your shareholders. Again, Finance is critical in making the right decisions, because innovation is good for the business, but they need to be innovations with the right P&L – that’s where we play the role of guardian.

One more general challenge – and, of course, you know much more about this than me - is the continuous pressure on recruiting and maintaining talent. It’s not new, but it's still very relevant, especially in attractive markets like the Netherlands, where we have a significant footprint. So, that's something that we need to manage by keeping an eye on motivation and offer People growth opportunities.

We are an attractive employer and have been established for a long time in a very interesting industry. But, every day, we need to remind ourselves that we need to take care of our people.

That leads on to your history in FMCG. It would be good to hear what you love about the industry.

I have to admit, I probably ended up in FMCG by luck. At the beginning of your career, you are usually unsure of what it is you want and where you want to go. Then you end up somewhere and suddenly you find it very interesting, and you stay there.

FMCG is one of the most volatile environments you can be in; consumer preferences change very often, competition evolves, and you’re fighting for market share. For Finance, that also poses a challenge, because we really need to be on top of everyday developments. Planning and forecasting are important, but it’s not easy.

However, you can also deliver a lot of value, because a large element of FMCG is this connection to the customer - making things very tangible. It's very different than working for a bank, because here you can see the products on the shelf.

A similar theme is the impact on the environment. FMCG companies produce packaging and plastic pollution - that’s tangible. In a way, it’s inspiring when you work on the business case as a Finance professional – we’re not only going to save money by streamlining our packaging, but we can remove tonnes of plastic from the environment.

The last element - and I'm beneficiary of it – is the opportunities for development and growth, especially if you work in a big multi-national, global organization. With the speed of change, you can learn a lot in a fast amount of time, develop, and gain opportunities. I find that very interesting, because you don’t do the same thing for a long period of time.

That slightly links to the first question, too, where we discussed the opportunity to meet other people and see other cultures to obtain a global view.

Of course, we need to be prepared for this fast-paced change. But, if you accept that and are ready to be part of this journey, it might offer very nice opportunities.

With large-scale organizations, often it takes a lot of time for decision making, as many people must agree. Do you feel that your organization and previous organizations can work at that speed?

On one side, the closer to the market and the firing line you are, the more speed there is. At the beginning of my career, suddenly one afternoon we learned that the competition was launching a new product line, so we had a meeting until late in the evening to sort it out and come up with ideas, models, etc.

The fact is, you grow from the market; the slower it seems to be because of the wider view, the more complexity you need to react and deal with. So, it’s a different type of pressure.

You've led global teams. What is the key to successful leadership?

I try to manage people, lead people, and inspire people. One side of that is about being authentic and open about what goes well and the challenges, while also encouraging this openness within the team. Be honest. That's one thing I have learned over time.

It's quite interesting when I reflect on this, because coming from a country that doesn’t have a very diverse society, I think diversity within the team is really important. It makes teams better overall by bringing an enrichment in different perspectives and contexts, which also helps the business. Of course, there are different aspects to diversity - cultural backgrounds, gender, etc.

It’s a fact that women have better emotional intelligence than men and are more sensitive to certain topics. You need those perspectives in decision making.

Secondly, when I’m managing teams through empowerment, much of it is about accountability. Some call it freedom within the frame, but it's all about giving people room to work on their topics, supporting them, but at the same time expecting the results.

It’s not about avoiding making mistakes; it's about being responsible for what you are doing. It's fine if you don't know how to get there - we can discuss it, and I can help you. Show you want to get there and be open about the issues and how I can help. It can sometimes be a difficult balancing act, especially if you’re working under pressure or there is a crisis. However, I strongly believe that’s the way to grow and how to become inspired. That is what I’m trying to pass on to my team and the principles I try to apply.

Furthermore, it’s a journey of learning for each manager and leader. You make mistakes and you try to learn from them. You evolve as both a human being and a leader over time based on the experiences you take and the mistakes you make. It’s not a given recipe.

The people you manage also evolve, as you have new generations entering the workforce with a different approach to life, and expectations of what they want from a company and a manager. You need to recalibrate slightly, as what was important when I was 25 or 30 is different for those today. That’s another challenge.

I’d love to hear more about the executive leadership program you decided to do at the London Business School.

It was a joint program with FrieslandCampina and LBS for leadership teams. Every year, a group of around 20 people joins the program. It was a bit unfortunate, as it was in the middle of COVID, so it was carried out online and I missed out on some of the experience.

Nevertheless, I found it very interesting, as it's a blend of theory, knowledge, and insights from both academics and practitioners. There was individual coaching, peer-to-peer coaching, and peer-to-peer feedback. It included a project work experiment, which you discussed with your colleagues.

The program was focused on adopting a growth mindset and how it helps you succeed. Factors within that touched on adaptability/openness to change, approaches to problem-solving and innovation in your work, and resilience to volatility and uncertainty.

It helped me as a manager and a leader to identify and realize your team’s capabilities.

For myself, it's a very useful framework to challenge myself - sometimes, it’s okay not to know, just go and try, and maybe it will work or not. A part of the program was the experimentation and explaining the concept of innovation. This is not what we are taught in big multi-national companies; usually, it’s about managing risk and being safe, as mistakes can be costly. But this program was the other way around and encouraged you to try again, try new things, and experiment. That’s what I took away from the program.

The growth mindset piece is interesting, because we did a virtual event, not long after COVID, with speakers from Netflix, Heineken, and Danone talking on this subject from different viewpoints.

So, the final question. What is your favourite motto or quote?

I have two quotes about the same thing. There’s a discussion on whether it comes from Albert Einstein or it’s a paraphrase, but it’s: “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.”

Then there’s a similar quote from Elon Musk - of course, a very controversial person, but someone who is changing the world. He said: “The best part is no part. The best process is no process. It weighs nothing, costs nothing, can’t go wrong.”

What these quotes highlight is the concept of simplicity. I believe that, sometimes, we complicate our lives a bit too much. Again, it is a bit philosophical, but if you translate the work environment in Finance, we often develop very sophisticated concepts, which are not very efficient and create complexity.

Complexity is a cost, and at times we do it very opportunistically, because we don’t want to go and fix the basics; we just put one patch on another patch and things become big and complex. That sometimes happens on purpose or because we have a job to maintain, solve, and manage this complexity. It's always good to look at the bigger picture. Ask yourself what your long-term view is on what you want to achieve. Challenge your thinking and ask yourself: Do I need this complexity, or can it be simplified? If so, put the effort in to do it.

A very concrete example - very famous in FMCG - is the number of SKUs you have (the single product combinations). I remember the discussion from 20 years ago and still hear it today - marketers adding the SKU lines, and Supply Chain trying to minimize them, as sometimes the cost level, marginal gain of your market share, and profitability is not worth it. You need to look at the total cost and total view. So, maybe not the most popular topic, but it is something we all can ask ourselves in a job or company, but also in society where things get increasingly complex each day.

Thank you to Marcin for speaking to Hannah Mallia, Director in our Finance & Accountancy recruitment team in the Netherlands.

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