Romain Taffouraud is the Managing Director of Sun Chemical in Geneva, Switzerland. He was previously a CFO at Sensient Technologies Corporation and Plant finance Director at Procter & Gamble, where he spent almost 13 years. Romain was also the President of Versoix Athletics, the second largest club in Geneva.

How do you feel your passion for sports - athletics and the running club - helps you be a better leader?

There are numerous similarities between sport and business management. Firstly, being good at sport – which, for me, means having fun and reaching my own targets - does not happen from one day to another. It means training, practising, and having a certain rigor during the exercise. This is the same at work, where day after day, I try to show the pace and provide the right example to my teams.

Secondly, when you practise for several years, you feel the need for change, for new training exercises, and for new challenges. Again, this is the same at work, where you need to find new ways of running your business in order to be even more successful year after year.

Also, creating and developing a club or an association gives you a different purpose and use of your leadership skills. After a few years, the association [https://new.divonnerunning.fr/] I created with a friend now has more than 130 members that requires us to design and propose the right offer (training sessions) to targeted clients (passionate runners) that you first recruit and then try to retain.

What are the current recruitment challenges that you face?

As far as recruitment is concerned, our organisation currently faces two types of challenges. First of all, Switzerland is a very particular market with a structurally low unemployment rate. It reached its lowest level in 20 years, at 2.2%, by the end of 2022. We are therefore now below the famous frictional unemployment and close to a kind of shortage.

This is even more true for certain types of profiles that are difficult to find in the market – mostly resources with one or two experiences, mobile, dynamic, and qualified in specific areas or skills (soft or hard). These profiles are rare to find in the market currently.

The second challenge is a relatively new one coming from new behaviours adopted by our more junior employees. There is a strong request for higher flexibility in what employers can offer and the way we design our future roles. In absence of adjustment, these employees - which are also generally more agile in the job market - do not hesitate to switch employer whenever the opportunity arises.

What does your organisation do to drive its sustainability agenda? 

The first critical step for our organisation was to know where we were in terms of sustainability. That means, to design an effective action plan, we first need to understand the global footprint of the organisation.

I am currently located in a production and R&D [research and development] site. So, the application field is huge and exciting. We have been tracking our precise utilities consumption and can easily identify the drivers of it, from our production site/headquarters to our portfolio of products.

Then, the role of engineers is to change the way we operate, find alternatives to the less green raw materials, move to faster production time, reduce utilities consumption via lean production and concentrated production, etc.

The first actions and results are low hanging fruits - switching lights, lowering the heating systems - which are easy to implement. Whereas, reformulating old products and convincing customers to move to greener alternatives takes much more time. In that process, it is important not to be a standalone actor, but benefit from the support of a whole organisation. From that perspective, the DIC Way promoted by our company is a great foundation, internally and externally.

But there is still one positive thing about the current utilities crisis and the related price increase: it gives an additional financial incentive to all sustainability projects. For instance, whereas moving to solar energy was hard to justify so far, with current market prices, payout is only in three to five years!

What advice would you offer to someone moving to Switzerland?  

Moving to Switzerland is relatively comparable to moving to any other foreign location. Meaning, although you might believe the language(s), the culture, the habits are close to yours, you should still make the effort to understand and integrate them.

As in any other change, try to understand what makes Switzerland so different and why it has been stable for decades.

What is a memorable moment from your career and why?

It may sound paradoxical, but the months I had (and we all had) to overcome during the pandemic were probably the most exciting and challenging ones. I am convinced the accumulation of so many crises in such a short period of time will not happen again soon - at least, I hope!

The challenges were mostly of two types. Firstly, on the human side, COVID-19 created a new environment, which we were obviously not prepared to face or handle. In March/April 2020, the questions to answer were as simple as: What do we do? Should we shut down the production site or keep it running to serve our customers? Where is the right balance between protecting our people and protecting our business?

With my team, I had to invent the local customized answer to the daily problems over several weeks; I must have spent about 80% of my time on people and organisation management - for an ex-CFO, quite a challenge!

On top of that, after a few months of business euphoria, unexpected business complexity was added to the health situation – raw materials pricing and availability became an issue, transportation costs skyrocketed, utilities costs exploded…

In that context, as a business leader, you have to innovate, think one step ahead and out of the box to find solutions others will not even have imagined. Sometimes, you win.

What is your favourite business motto and why? 

Several years ago, I found the following quote written on the wall of my English production manager’s office: “I never lose. I either win or learn.” Since then, I keep leveraging these words from Nelson Mandela.

In our current world, where failure is an issue and hardly forgiven, this is a very positive way to turn (bad) experiences into something positive and insightful for the future.

For the younger generation also, turning all trials into a new learning experience is critical. I do not necessarily believe, however, as the great Taoist Lao Tzu said: “Failure is the condiment that gives success its flavor,” but there is a whole literature on the virtues of failure for those interested.

What is the secret to building a strong network?

First of all, I am not sure there is one secret to build a network, because each network is linked to your personality, your history, your experience, your background and so on. But, I will offer two bits of advice.

Firstly, you should not activate or try to build your network when you need it – meaning, when you need it, it’s actually too late. I learnt that, because I decided to use my network after 13 years in P&G, where you are just living in a kind of bubble.

So, my first advice is, as soon as you start your working experience, try to keep your connections. Be interactive, try to get the best out of the people you can connect with, and be open and transparent with people. It should not, however, be something you are forcing yourself to do - and don’t make anything artificial.

Secondly, networking comes from two sides – meaning, you will leverage it when you need it, but please also ensure you are openly available to people and to young students when they need something. You should not only look up, but also look down.

If you believe first that you won’t get anything from a connection, it’s wrong; you always get something from the people you mix with. For instance, a new student will teach you and give you some advice on how the new graduates behave and what they think. This will bring you onto something you can learn, and you can replicate in your next recruitment, for instance.

Having moved from Finance to General Management, who are now the main stakeholders that you deal with internally? How have they changed?

The main change while moving into General Management is that you will have to deal with a vast majority of stakeholders - actually all available stakeholders within the company. Whereas, in the past, as a Finance Manager, you are mostly dealing with a limited number of people.

This means you have to interact with different people that you were not particularly familiar with in the past - obviously with HR, with recruitment, but also I’m thinking about Health and Safety and about Purchasing - so there are quite a lot of different stakeholders you have to manage.

You need to know what their constraints are, what they are thinking, what their ways of doing business are, that kind of complexity. Because, from one day to another, you are expected to know what they have to do, to know how to behave, and what their strategy and plans are. You must support these people, to show them that you are supportive and can be seen as a leader. Also, as a manager, you have to understand what they are doing.

Those are the kind of challenges I experienced at the beginning, when moving to this General Management role.

Was there a learning curve when you first started?

Definitely. Coming from Finance, you have a certain proximity with some departments and some stakeholders. I was quite used to dealing with management or top management, for instance, doing the reporting; external partners were also relatively easy for me, as well as salespeople.

Prediction and Supply Chain were tough areas, as they are very specific, highly qualified people. Yes, you have to build proximity, closeness with these people, try to understand what they are doing, how they are thinking, just to make sure you understand what they are doing and what their constraints are, and really being very humble at the beginning.

I was not afraid to say, “Sorry guys, I don’t understand” or, “I don’t know what you are doing or what your constraints are, just tell me. I will be able to help you, I will support you, but just explain what you are doing and what the context is, so that we can build something together.”

Thank you to Romain 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.