She’s in the zone when out of her comfort zone
A woman with no experience in manufacturing talks to reporter Catherine Groenestein about why she’s leading a Fonterra team that makes ingredients for Mars bars, Panadol and asthma inhalers.
On her OE Emma Bennett backpacked alone through South East Asia and worked in a liquor shop where the counter had machete marks on it from a recent holdup.
She likes going outside her comfort zones, pushing boundaries and taking chances on people.
So when she was offered the chance to run a plant making lactose, Bennett, who has a background in human resources and no experience in manufacturing, said yes.
Bennett grew up in Dunedin. She left for Victoria University intending to study law, but ended up doing undergraduate and post graduate degrees in psychology.
While studying psychology Bennett ‘‘just got really interested in people’’, she says.
Then she went overseas and spent a year living well outside her comfort zones, including in a seedy area of Edinburgh.
‘‘I made a point of going to some interesting places. Looking back there were some fairly hairy situations that I found myself in and I think out of that I learned to stay really calm in situations.
‘‘I did that for a year and loved it, then thought ’best come back to New Zealand and be an adult’, and reconnected with my husband.’’
Joe Lawn, her husband, is a dairy farmer but they met in Wellington. When he returned to Taranaki, she followed him.
Her first job was at Witt, teaching commercial law and employment relations. The manager took a chance on her, and she thrived.
‘‘I really loved it and again loved being out of my comfort zone - not being a lawyer teaching commercial law. From there I moved into an HR role at the council and again had a fantastic manager. Again no HR background and again someone who was willing to take a chance on me, so I thought ‘better not let her down’.’’
She then moved on to an HR role with Fonterra, where she spent four years before taking some time off to have her first child.
‘‘While I was on parental leave I had a manager ring up and say ‘hey, we’ve got this operations manager vacancy at Kapuni, would you be interested?’ You have those initial moments of self doubt, going: ‘I don’t know anything about making lactose’.
‘‘He talked me through that, said: ‘look, we won’t let you fail, we believe in your skill set, you bring something different to the team’. So I ended up getting this amazing job which I still think I’m completely unqualified for, and have been doing that for close to four years now.’’
There are 120 staff at Fonterra’s Kapuni lactose plant, which produces about 50,000 tonnes of specialty lactose each year.
‘‘If you’ve ever had a Panadol or know someone who uses an asthma inhaler, the bulk of what you’re consuming is made at this site, which is pretty neat. We make a lot of base powder for infant formula, our lactose goes in Mars bars. It’s a very cool product that people don’t know too much about.’’
Fonterra has four other lactose plants but they make a lesser grade of lactose used for standardising milk powder.
‘‘This is the boutique one, it is more high end and specialised than the others.’’
She remembers being ‘‘horrifically scared’’ about how the workforce would react to her, but found the 120-strong team very welcoming and accommodating.
‘‘The team here, they are the best, salt of the earth group of people. They tell you if you’re doing a bad job and they’ll tell you if you’re doing a good job, and there’s nothing like working in that really honest, refreshing environment.
‘‘We’ve figured out we’ve each got different strengths and they gel really well together. I don’t know how to technically make lactose, that’s their job. I see my job as, how can I support them? It’s about me taking the frustrations away from their day and I don’t need to know how to do their job to do that, so it’s a very different arrangement to what they’ve had previously but it seems to work.
‘‘I think it was a pretty ballsy move from the company and the hiring manager at the time to put me in the role. They were able to look beyond the technical knowledge people usually need and say ‘its about people skills and being able to see into the future and think about strategy and what our customers will want in five or 10 years’. I am incredibly grateful that I was given the opportunity.’’
Home for Bennett and Lawn and their two children is a dairy farm, with a really good team of staff, including nannies and supportive family who help with the kids.
‘‘His family are dairy farmers. Quite a few of them live in Kaponga, not too far from here, and they love telling me at every family reunion that they’re all my bosses,’’ she says.
Outside of work, Bennett enjoys social netball and barbecues, tennis and waterskiing.
‘‘I’m a big coffee drinker, I love trawling around good cafes in New Plymouth and sampling a good soy flat white, which is ironic seeing as I work for Fonterra. That’s the only time I don’t drink milk. Other than that it’s spending time with the kids.’’
Bennett makes bold choices when hiring staff, paying forward the confidence others had in her. Plus, she says, diversity brings strength to a business.
‘‘As a company, or any business, the decisions we have to make and the challenges we face are more complex than ever and to make really good decisions in those moments I think you need firstly more than one person involved in that process and then more diverse thinking to make sure everything has been well considered and we arrive at the best possible decision. So when you’ve got people from really diverse backgrounds and diverse experiences they bring different thinking styles.’’