Lakshmi Krishnan

Lakshmi Krishnan is a very experienced end-to-end human resources leader. She has engaged in high-impact strategic business partnering at local, regional and global levels in a range of companies. She brings a good balance of overseas and local work experience across a mix of industries including IT, manufacturing, banking and consumer goods.

Lakshmi is passionate about the future of work and has deep experience in OD, inclusion, and purposeful authentic leadership. Her current role as HR director at Unilever includes the following priorities:

• Digital transformation – leading team in design and deployment of a digitized procurement organization from a people context focusing on impact of processes, technology and culture. Successful delivery will enable team to be future-fit, raise the employability levels of the talent, and drastically simplify the way work is done.
•  Inclusive leadership – preparing leaders for the future by helping them with the right skills to create a culture with psychological safety fostering high performance and creativity.
•  Ready, available talent for senior leadership roles – take an active role in creating a bench of senior leaders for all key roles with an external focus to bring in more diversity of thought. In Lakshmi’s leadership, she has ensured that they have gender-balanced leadership at the top and actively drive that for the next level of leadership, as well partnering with the talent acquisition teams internally and externally.
•  Lean, efficient, flexible organization – embedding new ways of creating more capacity and capability in the teams via agile, internal marketplace and leveraging the whole ecosystem of open talent economy. Unilever has more than 15 Be Resourceful experiments running now (crowd sourcing, freelance, talent swaps, etc.) to really expand their ecosystem for identifying increased capacity and capability.
•  Digital learning for procurement, HR – relentless focus on lifelong learning delivered through a learning agenda that focuses on real-time, byte-sized, application-driven learning curriculum. Her team is rated as the best team for pioneering digital learning in UL.
•  Thriving, engaged workforce – well-being is at the heart of everything Unilever does. How do people thrive and how can they ensure that they are able to bring their purpose to work and that they see their roles being extremely meaningful to their context? This is measured through delivery of a series of interventions which ties in work done on diversity, inclusion, learning, and well-being, and how this is communicated to teams.