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How to build an IT department
CIO Forum: Unilever IT chief on getting staffing right...

By Andy McCue and Julian Goldsmith

Published: Wednesday 17 October 2007

Unilever CIO Neil Cameron is a 30-year veteran of the IT industry, and joined the company in 2003 from Diageo where he was also CIO. Andy McCue talked to him, at silicon.com's CIO Forum in London, about moulding an IT team.

Andy McCue: You were brought in from outside to head up the IT department at Unilever. What were the first steps you took in building your department?
Cameron: The first thing I did was get rid of half of them and then I got rid of another 40 per cent, some of which I replaced. So I ended up with... 40 per cent of the people that where there when I arrived.

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How did you go about doing that?
I think you've got to be ruthless in the early days. In the first 100 days, you get some license and you've got to make some quick decisions and deal with it quickly. If you hang about, say a year later, people will wonder why you are doing it now. And you have to have an impact on an organisation about what you're going to require going forward, what the capabilities are, the style and personality of the team.

Most people look up and wonder why some of the people are still there when they've watched them under-perform for years or not do the right thing. It's key to send the right message about what sort of behaviour will be acceptable in the future.

I believe you've described the process as "coaching people out" - isn't that just management speak for getting rid of people?
We all face this issue of how do you coach people out of a business. Sometimes you fire people but most of the time it's not as extreme as that. In many cases, almost everyone who worked for me when I turned up was a good person. Everyone wants to do a good job but maybe it wasn't the job I wanted them to do. Frankly, you have to deal with people honestly and establish what success is going to look like to them and whether they are going to be able to achieve it within their present organisation.

In fact when I joined [Unilever] everyone around me had in excess of 20 years and therefore it's a given proposition that for a number of people the conversation would be around 'are you going to early-retire me, so I get a big cheque when I go?'.

And what about your management team? How did you identify how to fill the gaps?
My strategy starts with knowing what I'm good at and what I'm not - when I need help - reasonably well. So, I like to surround myself with people who complement my certain shortcomings. Therefore, you will find many people around me who are quite structured and task oriented - because I'm not.

The other thing for me is a global vision, so I have to have a global team and that has to be represented in my business, so being UK-centric doesn't help. My team now has a Brazilian, an American, a Belgian, an Australian, so I have a team which is pretty eclectic in terms of mix. Gender balance is a big issue for me.

An issue for CIOs or any other kind of executive is succession planning. Is that something you've started to address?
I think my kind of deal with the business is that within a reasonable length of time I should be able to give them two successors, so that if I get run over by a bus or get a much better offer, then they should have two or three people that can be in the shortlist. So, I give people the space to think carefully about what kind of skill-set the business is likely to want in the next five to seven years.

What do you think these people are likely to be like?
It will be much more business relationship building with a bias away from programme management and technology. People who are sensitive about understanding how to work across many cultures. People who know how to manage third-party relationships much more effectively than we do today. And probably much more financially literate people than we've probably demanded in the past - not just a simple business case but really understanding the fundamental economic issues.

How are you finding recruitment at graduate level?
The thing is I shop in a world sense, so different countries handle their own graduate programmes, but in the UK my observation would be that we get a raft of applicants who on paper look pretty good. When we put them through the standard recruitment process, we really struggle to get the quality candidates we're looking for. So we are thinking much harder about addressing that with linking in with universities.

I took the decision to join the e-skills board and much of the stuff that has come out of the e-skills agenda has led to some progress. I would suggest we all have a think about how we can get on board, because it won't change without us.

Academia needs to change. It will change but it takes a lot of work. Resistance to change is twofold. There are those who don't see the problem and those whose vested interest is in the current situation. That needs a lot of shoulders against a very big wheel there.