Getting value out of culture

There’s more to being a lawyer than the study and practice of law. For Emilie van der Lande, it’s very much about people.

Emilie specialised in employment law as part of her degree for that very reason, but it was a lightbulb moment during a particularly fraught M&A deal, after she had qualified with A&O in Amsterdam, that set in motion the transition from being a lawyer to her current career as a people and culture consultant to start-ups and scale-ups. 

She remembers that exact moment: “The negotiations had become difficult, and it seemed that the cause of the difficulty was the resistance of the Chief Financial Officer (CFO) of the company being taken over.

“This was a listed company and our acquirer client was a family-owned company. We couldn’t understand why this person was being difficult until I read through his résumé and saw that he had risen from a junior accounting role to CFO; clearly an amazing trajectory for which he must have worked hard.

“I could see that he might resent being put in an inferior position once the company was taken over, and I suggested to the partner that we should try to see things from his perspective. We should focus more on the soft side, the emotional side, instead of the legal side.

“Something must have changed; I wasn’t central to the negotiation and I’m not sure what it was, but the deadlock was broken and the deal went through. From my point of view, though, it made me realise that there was more than law involved in every transaction – it’s the people that matter most.”

A new opportunity

Things then took an interesting turn for Emilie at the deal’s closing dinner. As she talked to the client, he suggested she send in her résumé since there might be an opening for her in his company. This she did, and was surprised to be offered a position in the HR function, not the legal team. “I thought about it and realised that this would suit me well, because my talent was not purely in law.”

That company was the venerable Netherlands-based group SHV, which in 2022 celebrated its 125th anniversary. Emilie duly joined in 2010.

SHV is a company of about 60,000 people involved in a range of activities from cash and carry wholesale to exploration and production of oil and gas. Its motto is ‘Courage to care for generations to come’. During Emilie’s eight years with SHV, she gained a huge amount of experience and knowledge about people management. In particular, this time underlined for her the importance of an organisation’s values.

“What is interesting about SHV is that the company’s values were set down about 50 years ago and have applied ever since,” Emilie notes. “Values related to sustainability were added more recently.

“What struck me was that the values were incorporated into every communication within the company, and its people lived the values. It impressed on me that if you set the right values, those values become the glue that binds a company together. That’s exactly the message I convey to the companies I now advise.”

After SHV, Emilie joined WeTransfer, the Netherlands-based internet computer file transfer service company, as Head of HR and Legal. From there, she became People and Culture Director at GoSpooky, a fast-growing company that helps brands make relevant content on social media.

Going solo

Emilie switched to working for herself as a freelance HR professional in 2019 to better balance work and home life with her husband and their three children, now aged 11, nine and five.

In early 2022, she teamed up with a collective of freelance HR professionals called People masterminds, again based in the Netherlands, which provides people and culture advice and strategies to start-ups and scale-ups.

As Emilie notes, in new and growing companies there is an inevitable primary focus on the business side – making and selling innovative products – without giving enough emphasis to managing the people. “We help these businesses to structure their systems for people management, helping them to define and institutionalise their values, producing a culture manifesto and advising on everything associated with HR, including, for example, salary structures and performance management. We can also help companies translate their values into practical steps as part of the organisation’s culture.

“What we don’t do is make the decisions for them – that is up to the companies themselves.”

As you might expect from a new company advising other vibrant new businesses, mostly in the tech sector, People masterminds tailors its approach to those of its clients. “We’re creative and agile, and maybe less formal than other similar types of company would have been in the past,” Emilie says. “Traditional HR strategies and tactics don’t work in this environment. Unconventional companies need an unconventional approach to achieve this, which is what we aim to deliver.”

The importance of people and culture

Emilie and her colleagues believe that their offering chimes with a transformation that is spreading through the whole corporate world, not just start-ups and scale-ups. “People and culture are no longer seen as secondary issues of importance or even as an overhead. Generation Alpha people want to work for businesses whose values they share: everything from achieving a healthy work/life balance to operating with a praiseworthy purpose, rather than simply making profits at no matter what cost to the environment. Companies need to have the right infrastructure to appeal to this group of people.”

It is not just employees who are looking closely at the people aspects of companies. “Companies will always have to look at their financial performance, but more and more investors are looking at their people performance – for example, what is their people turnover – and that is where culture comes in.

“Increasingly, due diligence is being done on people and culture as well as on revenues and profits,” Emilie says. “There is no growth if companies have a high turnover of their people.”

There is no shortage of work coming Emilie’s way, which itself reflects the importance that businesses increasingly attach to their people and culture. People masterminds is in the fortunate position of not actively having to market its offering; it gets approached.

Most of the company’s clients are in the Netherlands and Europe, but, as a result of her family’s move to Uganda in the summer of 2022, Emilie is setting her sights wider still – to companies in Africa. The move to Uganda came about because Emilie’s husband, who was also previously an M&A lawyer, was offered the role of chief executive of AFRIpads, a social enterprise which makes reusable sanitary pads for women and girls. AFRIpads is founded on the belief that if we overcome menstrual barriers, we are one step closer to gender equality.

It’s all a long way from Emilie’s own childhood, when her dream was to become a lawyer. She says: “I had this image of a powerful woman, fighting for justice in court.” It didn’t take long after she joined A&O in 2006 to discover her vision of what it was to be a lawyer was “only partly true”.

She credits A&O with teaching her how to become “a good lawyer, but more importantly, to become service-minded, and to understand the work ethic and the absolute imperative of accuracy – all of which I have carried forward with me.”

“Being a lawyer is empowering for a woman. I like to be challenged and I knew I would be at A&O. A&O had everything: a highly ranked firm, a great reputation, fantastic clients and fun people to work with.”

There was another dimension to Emilie’s professional upbringing that she has found invaluable. “I learned to be comfortable working with my superiors or those who were more senior than me. I learned not to be blown away just because I was more junior or the only female in the room. I became more aware of my role, while showing respect for those with more experience. That has been beneficial for my career.”

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Reconnect with Emilie van der Lande.

Emilie van der Lande

Chief People Officer, People masterminds

A&O: 2006-2010