Talking Heads is a Telum Media series that spotlights company leaders and explores their thoughts on business, leadership and communications.

In this edition, we spoke with Laura de Kreij, Senior Director, Corporate Affairs, Kerry Asia Pacific, Middle East & Africa. With a communications career spanning more than two decades across Asia, Europe and the United States, she has led multinational corporations in the food, industrial and technology sectors.

In your role at Kerry, you oversee an expansive remit, leading teams in Asia Pacific, the Middle East, and Africa. How do you attune yourself to the cultural idiosyncrasies and needs of each market, and what was the learning curve like?
Curiosity, listening and open-mindedness are critical to navigating any cross-cultural work, regardless of function. I’ve lived outside my home country for more than 20 years, so I do my best to lead with open-mindedness. It’s always a learning journey. Add evolving generational expectations to culture and you really need to be a lifelong learner.

Leading comms for a geography that includes Asia Pacific, Middle East and Africa requires adapting our strategy by market and packaging our communication in layers - region and local.

Internally at a region layer, we communicate content that everyone in our region should know about via town halls and are avid users of Meta’s Workplace. To reach employees from Nigeria to New Zealand, we also offer our town halls / key events live, twice on the same day, so that employees can join during their core work hours. This is more commitment for our senior leaders, but it’s more meaningful for employees to join live and ask questions.

At a local level, we encourage leaders to communicate at a country, site or function level how and what is most relevant, tailored to their team. While the word “empower” is overused, we do empower and trust our site leaders to lead the next level of communication in a way that is relevant to the local culture.

When working with media, the approach used in Kenya is different to Oman, Malaysia or Australia. We always work closely with the local on-the-ground team for advice and when there are gaps we’ll bring in an agency who knows the media and government landscape better than we do.

In our industry, we need to tailor our messaging as consumer preferences and food trends vary. For example, consumer adoption of plant-based alternatives are more established in Australia than in the Middle East - while perceptions of food safety or food waste vary greatly across the world.

I think the key is being able to recognise what you don’t know and be willing to ask for advice, use in-house experts, and outsource where needed.

In a recent publication by Kerry, you mentioned that you knew that you needed to play an active part in creating visibility and championing women. What does leadership, and female leadership, look like to you, especially for those leading the charge on comms and reputation?
Leaders, both male and female, earn the trust of others by giving clear direction, feedback, development opportunities and offering a physically and psychologically safe workplace. I see my role as clearing the deck, literally making sure my team and other colleagues have the information, resources and access to the organisation to do their job effectively.

Women face additional challenges borne from cultural and historical gender stereotypes and I help light their path when they doubt themselves or run into obstacles. The confidence gap between genders is absolutely real, so I’m often coaching women to take a stretch assignment or be a vocal champion so that they feel supported, recognised and seen.

Together with a few colleagues we started APMEA Women in Kerry to help connect, develop and recognise women in our region and we’ve had a strong response from both genders, as men are open-minded and curious to learn how to be better allies. I appreciate that Kerry supports this extra activity for both me and the 35 committee volunteers.

What is your own leadership style? If you were to pick one element only, what is the most important trait to being a good leader in comms?
Curiosity. Comms leaders can’t take information at face value, nor are we experts in all areas of the businesses. We have to be curious about the who, the how, the why, and the why not to create relevant communication plans, content or advice.

For a versatile comms career, I advise having strong financial acumen. If you are going to work with a CEO / CFO, you need to understand their language. Many years ago, I earned an MBA as I felt incredibly uncomfortable not understanding what was being talked about. Going through finance and operations classes helped me understand the business drivers so that I could translate what was happening into accessible language for employees and shareholders.

Kerry is proud to get its employees to become its brand ambassadors and talk about sustainable nutrition. Can you share some of the challenges of doing this and tips on honing the employees' confidence?
This is such a relevant question and it’s definitely a journey! We’ve emphasised foundational understanding through education and it seems to be working. Last year, all employees across all functions took six easy-to-understand, short online training modules that helped explain key topics including sustainable nutrition, climate action, responsible sourcing, circular economy and social sustainability.

For an employee in supply chain, they now understand their role in sustainable sourcing or packaging. For our commercial and RD&A teams, they can talk about how every percent reduction in salt or sugar in a formulation helps a customer on the path to sustainable nutrition, for example. By educating and providing solid facts and data our teams are more confident and proud of their work.

We reinforce key messages and progress towards our sustainability goals in our Town Halls and through Workplace to help connect the dots, and leaders reference our sustainability work in their daily interactions internally and externally to bring this language and conversation to all roles.

Kerry's areas of focus include nutrition and health, two topics that are often plagued by misinformation on social channels. How does Kerry go about tackling or mitigating misinformation in these sectors?
Misinformation is indeed rife. Several years ago, Kerry established the Kerry Health & Nutrition Institute (KHNI) to advance the conversation of science for healthier food. We lead with our data-backed research through our network of more than 1,000 Kerry scientists, external collaborators, and our Scientific Advisory Council.

The content comes straight from scientists and experts on nutrition, taste, food and sensory science to guide the broader industry on the future of food, and provides the latest, credible information to address everything from consumer and health trends, to challenging questions and issues facing the food and beverage industry.