Orange, the ultra-famous telecommunications and IT firm, serving both companies and private customers, has had a new Executive HR Director since October. For more than 30 years, Vincent Lecerf (EDHEC Grande École 1985) has dedicated his career to the full spectrum of human resources. His journey from company to company, each one bigger than the next, in a highly diverse range of sectors (mining, surface materials, transport and logistics) has shaped his approach to skills orientation and career change. Here’s a contemporary look at individual and collective responsibility, as well as the role of this particular profession in the life of each employee. 

Tell us about your current position and responsibilities.

I’m HR Director at Orange, which employs 136,000 people in 26 different countries: 55% in France, 45% abroad. The core of my profession is about making sure the firm has the best collective skillsets for the challenges it faces, both now and going forward. The stakes are particularly high in a sector that’s changing so fast. Staff teams must be effective and committed to working together, and employees must at the same time find meaning and fulfilment and be able to develop within the firm. Human resources policies work when the company’s plans and those of staff are aligned.

What does employee commitment mean in a firm?

It’s the employee’s capacity to take significant interest in the firm, first by spontaneously seeing their mission as meaningful, and then by driving that mission forward. Next, they must put all of their energy and goodwill into ensuring that, once achieved, their mission meets a personal objective: they don’t complete it just because it’s written in their contract, but rather they feel fundamentally accountable in seeing it through. This you might say is the submerged part of the iceberg, and things can be done more or less well, with more or less energy, collectively or individually. 

Fulfilment being the other side of the coin?

I firmly believe that there is an element of pleasure in work. It is essential to feel that what one is doing is useful. It isn’t a case of wonderful professions on one side in which people naturally feel a sense of commitment, and on the other professions of no appeal. I’ve met people passionate about activities that would not spontaneously have interested me. Pleasure can stem from anything in which you can find utility. When you work in HR, you try to understand other people’s work. Because taking an interest in people is above all about taking an interest in what they do.

You studied sociology when you left EDHEC. Did that reflect a desire to better understand HR as a profession?

I left EDHEC before the age of 21, so I was young and still wanted to delve into “human phenomena” broadly speaking. So I did a postgraduate diploma in sociology, which I thoroughly enjoyed. It offered me analytical skills which I still used today, which can be applied regardless of the era, particularly when it comes to organizational models. The arts and history shed further light – Shakespeare is still topical! The elements of modelling I take away from all that help me make decisions, analyse personalities or understand collective dynamics. As far as I’m concerned, there is nothing more complex or stimulating.

What was your vision of HR as a young EDHEC graduate?

At school, you are a long way from being able to imagine how an organisation works, with its rules and multifaceted practices. But associations are very useful to begin to identify somewhat dominant profiles, make choices and allocate resources. In organizations, you have to know how to manage skills, understand how a board works, how decisions are made. Cognitive biases can be huge: when mergers & acquisitions go well, the consensus is that “the strategy is right”; when they are less successful, it’s often put down to “a cultural or people problem”. Some dimensions are essential for success in every position – not just HR – in a firm, but in my eyes are not sufficiently valued in higher education curriculums. As a profession, HR has codes and technical aspects, because it also includes social dialogue and the codes that go with it, problems of employer attractiveness and remuneration policies. One of my bosses used to say: “Some people are first in their class, but what counts is recruiting those who are first in the schoolyard”. The context of changing jobs also needs to be accounted for because, by definition, an organisation is constantly transforming, even more so with its environment. 

What place does the human dimension have in an increasingly disembodied environment?

The two are not in opposition. The development of digital technology enables a different type of relationship and more qualified work. Just because a doctor is better equipped doesn’t mean their bedside manner or human judgement is diminished. They make better decisions because they’re better informed, but fundamentally they’re still in the same relationship and their decisions are made to offer the best care. But it does raise a certain number of challenges in terms of learning how to use digital tools. When I left school, professions were to some extent more standardised. New generations have more flexibility, but also have more environmental and social demands, sometimes paradoxical. 

Have skills, whether soft or hard, become data like everything else?

Of course, although we still don’t have the right instruments in this area. Since the 2010s, at Orange we’ve made employees the primary actors of their own development and given them generous access to the training courses they wish to pursue. So we have a huge amount of data on all of their skillsets with a view to possible career development, and it is absolutely essential to analyse that. The issue is not being able to measure it perfectly, but to make perceptions objective using shared benchmarks and methods. In a talent review process, managers express themselves by listing strengths and points that need to be improved on. We often challenge their opinions by comparing and contrasting them with the views of other managers, where the sum of subjective perceptions leads to an objective one. This means that an opinion can be teased out about dynamism, the collective mindset, the capacity to be a force for change, and even resilience. 

How do you rally people around a strategic corporate project?

You have to approach it in terms of a knock-on effect, capillarity or evangelisation. Doing is one thing, having something done is another, and having others have something done is yet another. You need to lay bricks that are sufficiently simple and inspirational to bring all staff on board, and then intelligently translate the weave of the activity into a particular context. With 136,000 employees, we need to set a direction, identify the main challenges, tipping points, the aspects of the organisation to invest in, type of culture we want to develop, essential training, capitalise on performance, recruitment criteria, and the types of profiles we’re looking for. It’s a kind of segmentation or market positioning that also has an important aspect of internal communication. An overarching HR policy can have a ricochet-like influence on a whole set of choices.

What kind of training does a HR director do?

We undergo training on technical dimensions: remuneration, social law, organisation, evaluating people, recruitment. But I think above all a HR director must learn through the understanding of the women and men and the technical world in which they work, by immersing themselves in the field. In business, you acquire 70% of your skills by exercising your profession, 20% through promotions and 10% through training. So training is not the main lever in skills acquisition. You primarily learn and develop your profession through operational implementation, even though you might not personally value it. 

What makes a good HR director?

First of all their capacity to understand business, human, social and societal challenges, and to develop effective policies for these domains. Their capacity to value what someone has been able to do and learn, and to decipher the skills acquired through specific experiences. A job interview often looks at connections, that moment when the candidate switched from one world to another or encountered different difficulties which made them aware of skills and personal limits. What’s often interesting in interviews is what people don’t say.

For that, you need method and structure. Our role is neither to do good or evil nor to please people, and the rules of the game must be laid down from the outset. The time often comes when decisions need to be made, whether positive or more difficult; you have to embrace them in support of management, with benevolence and empathy.