Estée Lauder's Tracey Travis Puts Stock in Developing Talent

By Ezequiel Minaya 

The career of Tracey Travis, finance chief of Estée Lauder Cos., proves that a circuitous path through the inner workings of companies can lead to success as a CFO.

The former General Motors Co. engineer ran plants, distribution centers, and sales teams for PepsiCo Inc. before leading the finance team of Ralph Lauren Corp. and rising to the post of senior vice president of finance at L Brands Inc., parent of Victoria's Secret and Bath & Body Works. Along the way, she delved into IT, compliance, investor relations, corporate and brand strategy and helped turn around struggling divisions.

"The breadth of the responsibilities that I have today were built on the experiences I had early in my career," Ms. Travis said.

Her journey is shaping how the New York-based cosmetics giant attracts and develops finance employees amid stiff competition for talent in a tight labor market. Central to the effort is the notion that getting the best from a team often involves placing talented employees outside their comfort zone.

Ms. Travis this year pushed for the creation of a program that gives her staff exposure to different areas of finance and strategy.

"It has proven to be a retention element of how we manage talent," she told the CFO Journal in an interview.

Through the program, finance employees leave their assigned role to work with new managers in other areas of the department.

A corporate accountant, for instance, could take an assignment in the global brand finance team to learn the ins and outs of tracking consumer behavior. Or an accountant could be assigned to a regional team to help determine the best location for new stores. Or the employee might end up in strategy and new business development looking to fill gaps in the company's brand portfolio.

Assignments last six to eight months and focus on a project that aim to occupy roughly 40% of a participant's time. If the program is successfully completed, an employee could have the opportunity to swap positions.

The new program is in addition to the more traditional finance and strategy program tailored to prospective employees who have just received their master in business administration.

A company program geared toward recent MBA-program graduates was launched in 2017, also with the backing of Ms. Travis. That program offers rotations lasting six to 12 months each, offering turns in business areas that include: brand finance and strategy; regional and affiliate finance and business management; corporate financial planning and analysis; treasury; e-commerce and online finance; research and development finance; supply chain finance; and investor relations. The M.B.A. program can last up to three years.

"I had the good fortune of starting in a field role and then moving to a headquarters role," Ms. Travis said. "So I encourage my team to do that -- not just within various levels of the finance organization but cross-functionally as well."

Companies such as General Electric Co., Honeywell International Inc. and General Motors Co., have long been lauded for developing financial talent with a combination of training and rapid rotation of promising executives.

These kinds of programs are becoming more widespread due to a tight labor market and a workforce that is increasingly accustomed to hopping between jobs and companies, said James Langston, a managing director at executive search firm Diversified Search.

"It benefits the company in a great way because you have a much more versatile finance division," he said. "And it also is a recruiting tool in this hypercompetitive market for the younger set who is not interested in being pigeonholed."

The unemployment rate fell in September to 3.7%, a 49-year low. And finance jobs are particularly hard to fill these days, executives say.

The number of accounting and auditing jobs, for instance, were projected to grow 10% between 2016 and 2026, faster that the 7% growth forecast for all occupations, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

"Great talent has always been more difficult to source and certainly with unemployment being as low as it is that creates more of a challenge, " Ms. Travis said.

The competition for the best finance recruits has become even more fierce as the department's mission broadens.

"We are increasingly leaning pretty heavily on our finance team and a few other teams to really manage multiple projects," she said.

Write to Ezequiel Minaya at [e-mail]

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

October 18, 2018 05:44 ET (09:44 GMT)

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