Wendy van Ierschot
Wendy van Ierschot is an entrepreneur, tech investor, bestselling author and founder of VIE People, a People & Culture consultancy specializing in in fast-growing companies. She presents the well-known Dutch podcast De Werkprofessor, wrote the book Scale-ups & Downs and appears in many different international top HR expert lists, including the top 100 HR influencers (worldwide).
Starting a company is a big step, scaling a company is a real challenge. Only 0.7% of companies in the Netherlands have more than 50 employees and more than 5 million turnover annually. Worldwide these figures are in the same range. Scaling up is difficult and requires a different management style in every phase.
In her story, Wendy discusses the different growth phases of a company and which leadership style suits each phase. The leadership style that made the company successful in the beginning usually gets in the way when scaling up. A vibrant scale-up culture is full of seemingly contradictory behavior, as for example you need to experiment as well as be disciplined. She also discusses HR priorities, which differ per growth phase and do not necessarily depend on what employees ask.
Wendy has received several awards and honorable awards, including ‘Woman of the Year Award 2014 (USA), ‘FD Gazelle 2015’ and is listed as ‘the Next Woman 2017 & 2018’ (award for the most influential and successful business women in the Netherlands) . Wendy also holds various board positions.
Her personal mission is to ensure that all people have meaningful jobs, work towards inspiring personal goals and continue to develop themselves every day.
Her speaking topics include:
How to design the workforce that makes your company excel and change the world.
In this talk Wendy explains the stages of growth and the accompanying HR strategies. The importance to understand in what stage of growth your company is, in order to implement the right strategy for your people to excel. Design the HR road to scale up. From recruitment to talent development and meaningful jobs for everyone, to leadership development.
The HR tech landscape, what is available and when to use which tools? Using technology to measure and analyse your workforce. In this talk Wendy shows some in-depth overviews of the HR tech landscape: What HR tech tools to use in which stage of company growth on all aspects of the employee journey: Talent management, Performance management, Onboarding, Organisation development, HR analytics. Wendy explains what tools area available, in which cases to use what technology and in which cases you should avoid technology altogether.
Speaking at TNW2019: