Interview
with Loren Herringa--VP of HR at Land O'Lakes
Don
Schmitz/Human Resource Staffing
This
interview is the first of a series of interviews with leading
HR Strategic thinkers. I was fortunate last month to sit down
and have a great conversation with Loren Heeringa, VP of Business
Human Resources at Land O'Lakes in Arden Hills.
Loren
was educated as an Industrial-Organizational Psychology at
the University of MN . He began his HR career as a Honeywell
generalist and grew rapidly in his responsibilities and title
to Business HR VP. He left Honeywell for the University of
St. Thomas where he served as VP of HR for three years. In
2004 he joined Land O'Lakes where he presently serves as VP
of Business Human Resources. His special talents include HR
strategy, succession planning, executive coaching, restructuring
businesses, mergers, acquisitions and divestitures but his
real love is talent management.
His
company, Land O'Lakes, is a 12 Billion Dollar, Privately-Held,
Fortune 500 company with 2000 employees in Arden Hills and
approximately 9000 worldwide. The company is evenly split
as a food and agriculture company. Their dairy foods products,
such as butter and cheese, are easily recognizable. Less recognizable
are their agricultural products -- feed for animals, seed
and chemicals for crop protection.
I
was particularly interested in his comments that, “High learning
occurs during high change experiences.” Loren believes, when
you're challenged, you grow. He stated that in a recent meeting
with top management, the HR leadership received the challenge
to elevate the talent management agenda throughout
the company to help the company grow faster .
Loren
believes HR's strategic priorities for the next five years
includes better management of talent and diversity, more effective
organization design, improving business and HR processes and
increased use of technology. He also believes finding, developing
and keeping the best talent will require strong and effective
HR leadership.
Loren's
HR leadership approach was heavily influenced by Dave Ulrich
and by the GE HR model. He believes its HR's role to drive
business and HR strategies and to find and retain the best
people possible to make the strategies a success.
He
concluded his remarks by stating, “HR is very an exciting
place to be today but the bar for HR is going up and the challenges
will be even greater in the future.”
Reproduction
of this article cannot be accomplished without the expressed
consent of Human Resource Staffing. Don Schmitz is a popular
speaker and writer on all aspects of HR and CEO of Human Resource
Staffing. Don holds graduate degrees in Education, Administration
and Human Development. Contact Don@HumanResourceStaffingInc.com
952 854 6040
Back to the library
