UK 
United StatesKadisha Lewis-Roberts
CPO, Pure Data Centres Group
Lewis-Roberts, CPO Pure Data Centres Group, has some eye-watering M&A experience for some of the big players including Cadbury-Kraft. Here, she explains how a love of Lego and building structures led her to be a fixer of people problems.
Kadisha Lewis-Roberts
CPO, Pure Data Centres Group
Lewis-Roberts, CPO Pure Data Centres Group, has some eye-watering M&A experience for some of the big players including Cadbury-Kraft. Here, she explains how a love of Lego and building structures led her to be a fixer of people problems.
I meet her in her Suffolk home, later on in our conversation she reveals that she turned the stunning house that she sits in when we meet, from a former asbestos-clad barn to what it is today, a home that’s worthy of a photoshoot in a glossy magazine. It’s just a little ‘sideline’ she remarks, underplaying another massive achievement. It’s a glimpse into what this CPO is all about, she tells me that she works ‘at pace’ and I can see a twinkle in her eye that confirms that. She oozes ideas, is phenomenally sharp and even I can see that the automated transcript on our Teams meeting is finding it hard to type at the speed at which she converses, it’s a first.
It all began in operations
It doesn’t surprise me that Lewis-Roberts has a law degree, what’s more interesting is that she turned her back on that as a profession, opting for a gamble instead. “I went straight from Uni to work at Gap, the clothing company. That first job is a fundamental part of who I am today. It’s where I learned to operate at grassroots level and work out how that and strategy must marry up,” she says.
The role was multi-faceted and took the young graduate across several stores working in logistics, buying and marketing. “I did all that across the operational spectrum,” she explains. It was 1998, the year Google was launched, and US President Bill Clinton was impeached over the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal. She spent the next four years in those hallowed halls at the well-known retailer. “It was absolutely the best thing I have done because you meet a lot of HR folk that have grown up via a graduate programme, but my route has given me my USP - I am now really commercially focused from that experience.”
Pace is my thing and part of what I loved about my consultancy work was taking that blank canvas and really grasping the nettle by introducing a number of projects and programmes to shift the needle
She refers to it as doing the ‘operational grunt work’ and tells me that her next move was to Learning & Development where she stayed for the next few years, working her way through various roles and specialisms. “What I didn’t know was that I was actually being groomed to become an HR Director back then.” She was a specialist but one with a wide experience, she had worked within organisational change, engagement surveys and talent management to name but a few and it was soon realised that she was ripe for working on mergers and acquisitions with the breadth of her HR knowledge and know-how.
“The first big piece of work I did was with Cadbury-Kraft working on the European arm of an integration project.” She admits it ‘wasn’t easy’ but says in an organisation as iconic as the chocolate maker the experiences she had there were critical to her career. She knows now that some of the programmes that they were running at Cadbury were significantly ahead of their time including a leadership one sponsored by the Paralympics.
Other career defining moments came when she worked as Director of Talent at Mitchells & Butler, the leading operator of restaurants and pubs across the UK, including household favourites, Toby Carvery, Harvester, and O’Neill’s. With 40,000 employees at the time, it was a big job. A highlight was building a 200-capacity training centre which was ‘revolutionary’. “We had live chefs cooking and staff could come and sample the food in their lunch breaks, it was fantastic,” explains Lewis-Roberts. That was 2013, some eleven years ago.
That feeling of the headline act landing came again when next up she worked for SAB Miller, a FTSE-20 company where she was once again in the thick of it as the project lead on an M&A as well as the regional head of learning and development. It wasn’t an easy win landing the role either, the offer came following five hours of interviewing with a psychologist. The move involved a re-location to Switzerland, where she spent the next six years of her career. “It was incredibly challenging, but I also learnt so much about the business and all of the levers that you need to pull around M&A, that's where I developed a real sense of how you accelerate transformation at an organisational level.”
You don’t always have to deliver these significant, big bang pieces in HR, it’s more incremental for me. I have learned that organisations need to be able to digest things in a meaningful way as opposed to them thinking that they’ve been hit by a Tsunami of HR
She realised then that it’s an impossibility to ‘fudge two cultures together.’ It was a huge integration involving 210,000 employees. It was in Lewis-Robert’s words a ‘long, drawn out affair.’ A further M&A deal followed in 2018 with Amcor and Bemis, it was a significant event in the packaging industry. A year later, it was time to head back to the UK. Little did Lewis-Roberts know that the Covid pandemic was about to hit.
Successive lockdowns and unprecedented times wasn’t necessarily the best period to set up a consultancy but not one to do what’s always expected, Lewis-Roberts pressed on regardless. With such a wealth of M&A experience, she felt for her at least, it was time to branch out independently and offer change and transformation consultancy services. Yet, an opportunity arose to help shape and transform an organisation and it was just too good to turn down.
