Fabienne Lesbros, CPO of The Co-operative Group, gives us expert advice on how to become a procurement specialist.

See transcripts below.

How do you engage a purchasing team?
So it's all about where the business is, what is the strategy, what are the business needs, but it's also about what purchasing can deliver in terms of value. So it's not about waiting for demand, it's also about creating demand.

What is the best change management in purchasing?
It is very important to decide where the purchasing team is located. So when I start in a new company, I usually give myself three months to really get to know the team, understand its capabilities and skills. But also the history, where have they been, what were the requirements from the company; what are the expectations for the future. So best practices in procurement change management are all about creating a change that the team understands. So you can bring about the change together with your team, or you can show the team through your vision why the change needs to happen. And usually it is linked to business objectives. You need to assess where the team is at for that change. You will have people who are very good at embracing the change, because some people like change a lot and others will be completely in denial. Those who like change you make your change champions and they are there to help facilitate change within the team, and those who struggle with that you will need to be very close to them, and the line managers will need to be very close to them to deal with. supporting that change. Embedding change takes some time and you are going to make mistakes and the team is going to make mistakes along with you. So be patient when it comes to changes and understand that sometimes especially if you want to embed processes like category management, which can take up to 18 months. I think empathy for what people are going through is really important, so your leaders also need to understand how they are going to lead the change with you and really sympathize with what their people are going through. It is very important to understand what skills you are going to develop. I usually engage HR to work with me on this. It's work that I do with the leaders on my team, and HR, and really understanding what people need, what the skills gap is versus what the business ultimately wants. It's not about what they have now, but about what they need tomorrow. So it's as good for themselves as it is for the company in general. I would argue that soft skills in terms of influencing stakeholders are much more important than even the technical skills at that time. Because purchasing affects everything. The company expects a lot of commercial insight, and I think one of the most important developments in purchasing is that commercial insight; really understand the company from A to Z. I think it is very interesting to involve the sales team because these are the people who are potentially going to see the products of the future and by having a dialogue with them you get a dialogue directly with the CEO, in terms of the portfolio. What people need to understand about procurement is that they have the power to do it. Most people wait for stakeholders to give them permission to actually participate and build a relationship. What procurement professionals really need to do is be more proactive and feel empowered because they are the commercial acumen of the business. We are the only function in the company that touches everything and can also bring all external information about anything back into the company, and there aren't that many functions in the company that can do that. As a result, we can guide the business and become much, much more than relationship makers. We can be business partners.

Don't actually start speaking purchasing language with your stakeholders and stop actually calling them your stakeholders. Call them business partners. Start speaking in their language. So when you speak to IT, you speak in IT language. When you speak marketing, you speak marketing language and you also draw a lot of pictures if you want to.

What are your three most important career tips for ambitious professionals?
The first is about being technically competent. So try to learn as much as you can about how to do purchasing well, because I don't think that – especially at the beginning of your career – you don't get exposed to enough things and you don't understand it. how a company works.

For the rest of the transcript, please visit www.reedglobal.com/pscvideo

Please take the opportunity to connect and share this video with your friends and family if you find it useful.