Week 4 – Solving Leadership Issues

My past work week at Sephora, I had the opportunity to meet with representatives from the head company of LVMH. From them, I learned the difficulties of working with subsidiary companies and how Leadership Studies could serve to aid in this issue.

The reason for my meeting was to streamline the internal onboarding process for our strategic and high risk suppliers, to ensure they are compliant with our ethical, social, and environmental requirements at Sephora and LVMH. The current process model spans across five different applications and has no formal way to be tracked, other than a platform called Concerto, where documents are dropped and never really seen again. By meeting with LVMH, my goal was to propose two platforms to keep easier track of the flow of documents and the status of our suppliers in the onboarding process. However, unknown to my manager and I, LVMH was in the process of moving to an entirely new platform at the end of the year, making this project of my internship useless, since the changes would only be effective for 4 more months. Not only was this frustrating at face value, since I have been putting a lot of time and energy into finding applications to make the auditing process easier on my manager and the representatives at LVMH, but this made me think about leadership dynamics and how better leadership could have avoided this whole mess.

In Group Dynamics, I learned how important cohesion was to effective teamwork. If there is less cohesion, more communication is needed to make up for the lack of cohesion. In my opinion, the dynamic between my manager and the team at LVMH has extremely low cohesion: they only meet over Zoom, they are in completely different time zones (PST and Paris), and the LVMH team manages the other ~79 subsidiaries in the company at the same time as Sephora. However, there is also little to no communication. They do not respond to Microsoft Teams or email in a timely manner (I had to email and message 3 times to set up the meeting that I had with the LVMH team). This is because they operate on a different server than Sephora, and the notifications don’t come through! In order to boost communication and make the team and my manager more cohesive as a group, I am going to suggest standing meetings. They do not have to be frequent, but they must be regular. Whether they are every month or every six weeks, it will be incredibly valuable to have a type of “office hours” where my manager or other subsidiary sustainability leads are able to connect with LVMH at a designated time. This is only one suggestion to fix a larger issue, and since I am not too familiar with the layout of the larger LVMH company, it is hard for me to identify further pathways to boost communication. However, I will continue to be on the lookout for ways to improve leadership as I continue working with this team.