Trailblazer Leena Nair

Leena Nair

The first female, first Asian and youngestever CHRO of Unilever, Leena Nair is now taking her passion for people to Chanel as she leads the fashion house into 2022

Leena Nair is a woman of many firsts. As well as being the first female, first Asian and youngest ever CHRO of Unilever, she has been the first female in nearly all roles she held at the consumer goods giant over the last three decades – including the first female manager to opt for a factory stint and the first woman in Unilever’s Management Committee in 90 years.

But the Indian-born British national is not done yet. After three decades with Unilever, five as CHRO, Nair has been tapped by Chanel for the French luxury group’s top job, making her the first luxury brand CEO of Indian origin and the first from an HR background.

“Nair has built a global reputation for progressive and human-centred leadership, delivering significant business impact,” Chanel said in its statement announcing her hire.

It’s certainly true that Nair has been critical in the building of Unilever into a purpose-led, futurefit organisation, one that has become the employer of choice in more than 50 countries worldwide.

As Unilever CEO Alan Jope puts it: “Leena has been a pioneer throughout her career at Unilever, but no more so than in her role as CHRO, where she has been a driving force on our equity, diversity and inclusion agenda, on the transformation of our leadership development, and on our preparedness for the future of work.”

You would think that having overall responsibility as CHRO for the company’s 150,000-strong human capital across 190 countries would have been achievement enough, but Nair’s strong leadership, HR expertise, and passion for people was instrumental in helping to drive the continued growth of both Unilever’s profits (US$50.7bn) and its purpose.

Unilever is one of the world’s most socially conscious companies, scoring a best-in-class rating on S&P Global Rating’s ESG Evaluation in 2019, and crowned industry leader in personal products with continued scores of 90+ in the Dow Jones Sustainability Index since 2016.

It is also one of the world’s most diverse and inclusive, and it has been Nair’s leadership on this in particular that has created such an industryleading culture.

I always tell HR people they need to ‘walk with swagger!’ HR is no longer a backroom department, it’s a vital part of running any successful business. And if you want to support your people, you need to understand how the business works, and you need to be visible within the business. So, get out there and make some waves!

Under her tenure as CHRO, Unilever achieved a 50/50 gender balance across global leadership with Nair leading a pioneering agenda with bold new social commitments, including recent pledges to pay the living wage across its entire supply chain by 2030, and equip 10 million young people with essential skills by 2030.

She created numerous projects, many of which were pioneering the future of global work. She spearheaded the Unilever ‘discover your purpose’ workshops, catering to 6,000 employees to date; pioneered the four-day week pilot programme currently being explored in New Zealand; instigated the U-Work program, which joins the flexibility of contact work with the security and benefits of an in-house role; and initiated U-Renew, a paid learning sabbatical programme to help workers upskill, currently under test.

Throughout her three-decadelong career at Unilever, Nair innovated in the delivery of culturerich programmes, having previously initiated as Unilever’s VP of HR for South Asia the Career by Choice programme, to help women who’d fallen off the career ladder re-join the workforce.

It was almost exactly 30 years ago, in February 1992, when Nair arrived at the doors of Unilever. After securing an MBA from India’s oldest business school (XLRI), she secured a graduate management trainee role at Unilever in Hindustan, where

she worked her way up from the factory floor.

Cutting her teeth on a handful of managerial roles in employee relations and in HR, Nair landed her first leadership role in 2006 as general manager of HPC and Foods and Head of Management Development, where she led the move of the company’s Foods business from Bangalore to Mumbai and created a model for building capability that is now used company-wide.

Within 10 months, she was promoted, becoming the first woman on the Unilever South Asia leadership team. Responsible for the firm’s growth in five markets with a business size of US$6.75bn, it was here that Nair embedded performance culture as a way of life for Unilever, improving productivity levels by 33% within two years and transforming employee relations into a proactive employeecentric function.

Flash forward six years, Nair is promoted to Global SVP Leadership and Organisation Development and Global Head of Diversity and Inclusion, where she was instrumental in driving the company’s employer brand to a record high and advancing the diversity agenda to industry leadership. She also spearheaded the creation of a worldclass leadership centre in Singapore and was the lead on key technology innovations simplifying the firm’s core HR offerings.

It was in 2016 when Nair finally landed the top HR job. Relocating to London in 2016, she took the global HR reins as CHRO of Unilever and ran with it.

And why wouldn’t she? For someone whose purpose is to “ignite the human spark for a better business and better world”, Nair was certainly living her dream job. And she was recognised for it with HRH Queen Elizabeth II acknowledging Nair as one of the most accomplished Indian business leaders in the UK.

Now, in 2022, as human-centred leadership becomes more central to business success that it has ever been, Nair is taking her purpose and passion for people to the business of fashion, where she will run the show globally for Chanel, which generated sales of US$10.1bn in 2020, and employs more than 27,000 people internationally.