Cynthia P. McCague, Senior VP of HR

Citation

(2008), "Cynthia P. McCague, Senior VP of HR", Strategic HR Review, Vol. 7 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/shr.2008.37207aaf.004

Cynthia P. McCague, Senior VP of HR

Cynthia P. McCague, Senior VP of HR

HR executives share their experience in human resources

Cynthia P. McCague has been director of human resources and senior vice president at The Coca Cola Company since 2004. Since joining the company in 1982, she has worked in virtually every part of the Coke business. E-mail: koglobalhr@na.ko.com

Knowing your business inside out and understanding how it makes money is the only way to design an HR organization that can help the business win, every day and in every market. These sage words come from Cynthia P. McCague, director of human resources and senior vice president at The Coca-Cola Company. During her time with the company she has held HR and business roles, and she says it is her experience at the coalface that has shaped her thinking of how the HR function should support the business.

A diverse and valuable background

McCague’s entry into HR was over 30 years ago as a recruiter with local government, leading to her becoming the first personnel director for Alachua County Florida. Despite being thrown in at the deep end and learning lessons the hard way, she says she quickly realized that she loved the work. She took a pay cut to move into the manufacturing sector and found herself working with an HR manager from whom she learnt a lot.

She joined The Coca-Cola Company in 1982 as a recruiter. She then worked across the business in a variety of roles in Europe and the US, including a non-HR role for three years in the mid-1990s in London. From 1998 to 2004 she was HR director for Coca Cola HBC, a bottler operating in 26 countries in Europe and Africa, with 38,000 employees, which provided further valuable learning experiences. She says:

This role allowed me to leverage my experience in manufacturing and learn to be the head of HR for a large publicly-traded company. It also allowed me to be involved with two significant merger and acquisition transactions.

Leading the organization through extensive change set McCague up well for her current role. She comments:

The Coca-Cola Company is reigniting growth, having established a new framework for the business – the Manifesto for Growth – which included redefining our mission, vision, values, strategic growth paths and organizational capabilities. Helping rebuild this company I care about so much has been a labor of love. And the chance to create an HR function that is adding more value every day is exciting and rewarding.

HR supporting the business strategy

For McCague there is no doubt about the link between HR and business outcomes:

By working across our business for so many years, I have a strong view of how the strategies, activities and processes for which we are responsible can drive growth and results in our business. I believe that the role of HR is to create a workforce capable of continuously winning. I also believe passionately that nothing happens until somebody sells something – so everything we do has to work toward enabling the organization to deliver sustainable growth.

I’m very interested these days in exploring how to identify significant potential at ever earlier stages, so that we can deliberately provide the challenges and stretch opportunities to help people develop and grow as fast as possible. I’ve learned that a little “divine intervention” at the right time can make all the difference in growing our people with great potential.

McCague is focusing on how HR delivers added value to the business at less cost. She says:

We’re structured in the same way the business is, with specific geographic territories, each having an HR director. We increasingly have virtual teams of HR specialists operating globally – for example, in the areas of training and compensation and benefits. We operate in virtually every country around the globe and we are working hard to leverage the skills of HR teams around the world so we don’t re-invent the wheel again and again.

Talent will remain a focal point

Ensuring companies build a bench of the best possible talent will continue to be the HR strategy for the foreseeable future, says McCague. She sees change as a continuous process, rather than an event, and the practices and policies around this HR strategy are likely to evolve at a fast rate to keep in line with the rapid pace of change in the business world.

Finding new and better ways to predict talent needs of the future will also remain a priority. McCague comments:

I think the most important thing we are doing is embedding what we call “people development forums” into the management routines for our business units and global functions. Our people development forums are how we ensure that there are regular conversations among managers about what’s changing in the business and how they need to recruit and develop their people to be sure we have the organization that can win in the market place now and in the future.