Global strife and uncertainty have increasingly come into the HR spotlight in recent years—from a divided U.S. electorate to economic fears and conflicts in the Middle East and Ukraine. They are tensions known well to Richard Letzelter, CHRO of Acino, which employs nearly 3,000 around the globe.
The Swiss pharmaceutical company—part of global life sciences firm Arcera, headquartered in the United Arab Emirates—is focused on growth, particularly in emerging markets. It has a presence in more than 90 countries, with regional offices in UAE, South Africa, Ukraine and Mexico.
Hiring and managing talent in emerging markets, Letzelter says, is a unique HR challenge—but one that his nearly 30 years in global HR have prepared him for. Prior to joining Acino in 2023, Letzelter held HR leadership positions around the world, including heading up the French HR operations of Novartis.
Letzelter recently spoke with HR Executive about insights from his global HR experience on culture, collaboration and conflict.
Letzelter: I don’t know how it started to become the norm that people aren’t meeting anymore. That meeting candidates face-to-face now is the exception is bizarre. It’s so important to meet face-to-face—HR meeting candidates and our own teams.
Connection with our HR teams in the countries we’re in is very valuable for me. It means I can build more trusting relationships—from Johannesburg to Dubai to Mexico to Estonia—and these strong relationships are essential to collaboration and communication, to understanding the local context and culture, the challenges that they’re facing. All of that is vital to my role as an HR leader as I make the most informed HR decisions.
When we bring our HR teams together, it also helps with cohesion. Our people are scattered across the world, and some have eight-hour time differences between them, so it’s super important that we meet. It impacts our morale and how we work together.
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HR Executive: How does HR manage the vast cultural differences among your workforce?
Letzelter: It’s a subject that’s not just for HR. This is about building stronger teams with an enterprise mindset. It’s about being more deliberate in the way we want to work together, how we collaborate, even if we disagree sometimes. It’s about building trust—the ability for people to speak up without fear—and that translates in a very different way in the different cultures we operate in.
In Estonia, for example, people are used to power being distributed evenly; you’re expected as a leader to make decisions in a consensual, collaborative way. We’re a global organization, so our standard of operation is that we expect people to speak up, collaborate. When you’re walking outside those lines, then you’re not in the culture of the business.
HR Executive: What was your day one mandate when you joined Acino?
Letzelter: I remember I was told I was going to have to design policies, that more coherence needed to happen in the organization today that didn’t exist. What I found was a mature policy set in design but less maturity in the application of policies. It was about explaining, holding hands, supporting teams to make good decisions with policies—using them with maturity.
The other focus was defining a talent management framework. That’s been present throughout my career—identifying the best people for the best roles at the best time. You have to bring the whole business to the same level of understanding about why we’re doing this: We need to build stronger teams with a real enterprise mindset, and that means giving people the roles and responsibilities for them to have more of a global experience.
To build a global organization, [HR leaders] need to have worked in different environments, maybe different functions, experiment with working in different countries or regions, for example. What I’ve noticed over time is that the most success in leading and building a global organization comes from [HR leaders on] this trajectory.
HR Executive: How does Acino’s focus on emerging markets present both challenges and opportunities for HR?
Letzelter: Emerging markets have been characterized as having a really strong appetite for talent development. They give an opportunity for people to work in different countries, which is not necessarily what people are looking for in their career in the West, so there can be some opposition to the idea of emerging markets. But people want more exposure, new challenges—that’s pretty universal—and in emerging markets, the opportunity is higher.
When someone is a key talent in an organization and has the potential to become CFO but that CFO position doesn’t exist here [in the West], they can jump to a position that does exist [in an emerging market], and we had better respond as an HR team. We need to respond to that ambition because basically otherwise we may be losing the best people in the business.
These are opportunities but there are challenges, too. Emerging markets have this volatility and uncertainty—quite specifically to our type of geographies, it’s characterized by high levels of civil unrest. But that is what we have to deal with in HR in our kinds of organizations.
HR Executive: What do you anticipate will be the biggest external factor impacting your HR team in 2025?
Letzelter: Economic instability. It’s a classic issue but with the American election results and the intentions of the new administration—which have become quite clear—it sounds like there will continue to be some economic situations and uncertainties across the board. This will be driven by factors like inflation, trade wars, and that will impact the business and people’s personal expenses. This is going to require HR teams to be agile in managing compensation, looking for how to adapt benefits, how to adapt workforce planning. We are proactively working with our organization leaders to manage our workforce in these uncertain times. The past has shown us what could happen in the future.
Something else we’ll continue to focus on in 2025 is continuing to support wellbeing for all associates. We can see levels of stress and burnout, especially in countries where there are more uncertainties; we operate in countries that are at war. We are a partner of choice for companies that don’t want to operate in those markets, and this is where we have feet on the ground, where our people are based. That’s a reality for our HR teams across the world today, and it’s important we pay attention to their wellbeing.
HR Executive: How is Acino navigating skills gaps among the current and prospective workforce, particularly with emerging tech like AI?
Letzelter: We recently used an AI skills assessment tool to understand our approach to innovation. It was driven by shareholders. It’s there to analyze behaviors toward innovation and to help us hopefully identify the skills gaps we’re trying to narrow—to create a more detailed understanding of where training is needed in the future and how to tailor development programs.
It’s important to put the human touch in AI; that’s going to be the challenge of the future. If ChatGPT could do everything, we’d know that by now. There is a sense that AI is a solution that can be brought forward for any problem or challenge a company is facing today, but the human factor still needs to be prevalent. I’m old school like that; I like to meet my talent, to know them personally. That’s also my approach to mobility. I want to know what drives someone as a human being, as a potential leader. We may be able to use AI for that as well, but we haven’t gone there quite yet.
HR Executive: How do you continue to prioritize your own learning and development as a global HR executive?
Letzelter: In 2022, I started a certification in Gestalt therapy. I attended courses every evening with the Gestalt Institute in San Francisco online for a year-and-a-half. Psychology is a personal interest for me. It teaches me to be more present, more conscious, and I use it in establishing rapport with our people, in coaching and for myself as an instrument of awareness about what I feel. Gestalt therapy teaches you that your brain thinks certain things, you say what your brain thinks and another person hears something different—but the thing that doesn’t lie is the emotion, the sensation. That is deep down, the seed of every behavior. If you want to change behavior, you’d better try to go deeper to the emotion to make a lasting transformation.
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