How One Of Europe’s Most Exciting Unicorns Build And Execute ED&I

I had the opportunity to speak to Felizitas Lichtenberg, SumUp’s Global Head of Diversity and Inclusion to find out how they execute their ED&I strategy!

With a valuation of over 8 billion dollars, and over 3,000 employees, the business are creating real change within their communities and are at the forefront of the industry, having been recognised as a Top Global Employer for LGBTQ+ for their global efforts.

Discussions in the episode:

• Ways to promote diversity without “tokenism”
• How leaders can deal with bias and be intentional with their ED&I measures
• Creating an impactful global strategy: from start-up to unicorn
• The interconnectivity of ED&I and business strategy

Snippet from the interview:

What is it that SumUp are doing exceptionally well, and what do you believe others could learn from your experience in this so far?

We are also still learning, right? We are still on our journey, that's for sure. But what I believe and really appreciate about SumUp is, coming from a very large corporate world is it's a very empowering environment. So, when I started again two and half years ago, it's really a lot about listening to our people.

So of course, on the one hand side, it's understanding our data. What is for example, the female share representation across the different steps, levels across our markets, some countries are parity, others aren't, and which other data can we get gather in terms of representation for the LGBTQ plus community, ethnicity, age, etc.

That's the one thing, but also doing focus groups, listening to our people and our networks, supporting them and then bundling this up and creating a strategy based on the needs of our people one that is aligned with our global strategy and the purpose and mission of SumUp in our values.

We care about giving back to the community and the environment, team first everything about SumUp and “SumUpers” are really embedding D&I throughout the life cycle of our “SumUppers.”

That's something that we have done and I think that is probably key to success and with success, again, we are also learning. We fail, we get up, we learn, and we move on, but we have this culture of trust and empowerment where people can really bring their full potential without much hierarchy, political games and so on.

?? Listen to the full episode here:?https://bit.ly/3m8mfrO