Yetunde
Yetunde is a trusted adviser to business leaders and their leadership teams. She helps them to understand the cultural and behavioural changes required to ensure the successful implementation of a change in strategy, significant growth and/or expansion. She coaches teams on how to be effective and work collaboratively and through her consultancy Synchrony Development Consulting Ltd delivers in house leadership development programmes on Inclusive Leadership, Storytelling and Relationship.
Career
Yetunde’s professional background is in HR with a career spanning over 30 years of senior international and global cross-cultural FMCG experience. Following her MBA, she started out her career in Nigeria at the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA) doing a number of roles at the institute which at the time was one of 13 consortiums across the world and funded by the Ford Foundation and the United Nations.
She returned to the UK gaining experience in the world of employee relations, recruitment, diversity, and inclusion with Northern Foods plc a FTSE 100 company at the time. With Unilever Yetunde honed her competencies in management development, change management, cross-cultural awareness and stakeholder management, engagement, and alignment. Her global role at Allied Domecq was an insight into the impact of leadership behaviour on culture, employee engagement and performance. Through Imperial Brands and the opportunity to establish an organisation and leadership development function from scratch in a fast moving, global and significantly successful business exposed her to the value of the effective management of performance, the role of neuroscience, the criticality of leading with love and working and walking in synchrony with your purpose and what you stand for as a leader. At Imperial, she led complex global strategic change initiatives that resulted in significant commercial results in markets through leading teams comprising senior executives with HR and non-HR backgrounds. She led the global operating model transformation programme and was head of people integration in major acquisitions all of which enhanced her skills and ability to coach, advise and mentor leader at the most senior levels.
These experiences along with her life experiences have contributed to the establishment of her belief that love is the most critical leadership and organisational capability needed in the world today the compelling power that storytelling can have in the enrolment of others into vision and purpose that in order to be realised must be adopted beyond the one.
She also believes that organisations whose employees are full of joy, understand the impact of gratitude on teamwork, are organisations that will find it easier to be resilient, genuinely inclusive, adaptable, and successful in the long-term.
Today, Yetunde runs her own international advisory practice – Synchrony Development Consulting; A non-profit through which she raises monies for charity – The Enjoyable Life Series CIC; Is the founder and programme director of a global executive leadership development academy for the black woman professional in organisations – Solaris, is a published Author, A Speaker, and an Independent Non-Executive Board Director.