With revenue growth of an incredible 33% for 2023, in line with the pattern of recent years, Dutch semiconductor manufacturer ASML is a company that is rapidly transforming itself. This is a process to which Cristina Monteiro has been integral since joining as CHRO 12 months ago.
As part of a new series on the changing role of the CHRO, we spoke to Cristina about the changing dynamics of HR, the role of the CHRO in flux, and what lies ahead.
Monteiro is acutely aware that external forces shape both the business and her role as CHRO.
“Many different factors influence the global chip industry,” she explains. Increasingly sophisticated AI capability, electrification, and digitalization are driving demand for ASML’s technologies for the long term. However, the semiconductor industry has always been cyclical and sensitive to developments in the global economy. In recent years, the influence of geopolitics has increased as the industry is seen as highly strategic. In short, the industry is highly dynamic and growing rapidly.
“Today’s business circumstances are much faster and much more complex than in the past, and less predictable,” says Monteiro. “It requires us to think carefully about how we scale our organization, deploy our resources, and find the right people.”
Today, ASML is a company of more than 43,000 people, having hired an astonishing 10,000 people in 2022 alone. Such a growth trajectory makes an effective talent acquisition function essential. ASML’s leadership has long backed investment in the people function, she says, recognizing the business’s unique requirements.
“Our product is very specific,” she points out. “You can’t go and hire the same skill in another 50 companies.” Consequently, ASML casts its recruitment net wide and, today, its employees are drawn from about 140 nations.
“Given the 140 nationalities among ASML’s people, inclusion is a top priority.”
Growing complexity and unpredictability in the business environment have a direct impact on how HR operates. As Monteiro explains, a company may have a clear long-term vision and may understand its short-term needs, but HR operates between the two. “HR largely works in the mid-term,” says Monteiro, making a degree of uncertainty inevitable. “It’s not about having a workforce plan that’s set in stone. It’s about being a lot more agile and nimble.”
Increasingly, CHROs need to be Janus-like, facing both the future and learning from the past, as they lead for today. This can enforce trade-offs. “Sometimes, what we need to do for the future means we need to make decisions that don’t seem to make sense right now,” admits Monteiro. It is why an understanding of the business’s strategic environment is so important in the CHRO.
ASML has grown significantly in recent years, and as a result, is always on the lookout for tech talent all over the world. “Our employees are highly skilled technology professionals, and this job market is very competitive,” she says. “It is important to provide challenging careers, development opportunities, and an inclusive environment. We need to be an exceptional workplace for exceptional talent – this is something that works for everyone.”
Given the 140 nationalities among ASML’s people, inclusion is a top priority. “Our diversity is more than nationalities and cultures. It also includes aspects such as gender and neurodiversity, being able to be who you are,” says Monteiro. “We have to think about inclusion and how we work together holistically.”
“People come to this company because of its culture and its amazing story,” says Monteiro. As CHRO, she sees herself as a guardian and champion of that culture, particularly its very Dutch tradition of plain speaking. “It’s pretty flat and non-hierarchical. You can speak your mind,” she explains.
The company’s three core values are to challenge, collaborate, and care. The first of these is central to innovation, Monteiro points out. ASML’s success is built on the freedom to challenge accepted ways of working. “People join for this. They join for the technical and intellectual challenge, and for the fact that they can have an impact,” she suggests.
Monteiro sees HR as having a dual role in terms of the business structure. “HR has this role of helping the business grow, and of engaging people,” she says. “We have a dual influence: on business success and on people’s lives. You have to be able to think about both sides.”
In such a role, HR must sometimes undertake highly sensitive tasks. It could be downsizing in a tough market, or reorganizing for growth but whatever the commercial imperatives for restructuring, when livelihoods and careers are at stake, fraught conversations are inevitable. HR needs to ensure that morale and unity survive the upheaval, Monteiro emphasizes: “When emotions run high, HR plays a crucial role in bringing teams together.”
She speaks from experience. In her first CHRO role, at health and nutrition firm DSM, she worked on the merger with Swiss company Firmenich, requiring extensive remodeling of the business. While it was an incredible professional experience, Monteiro had to work on the new model knowing her own role would ultimately be excluded from it. “It was fascinating, and a little bit heartbreaking,” she reflects. “You get emotionally attached to the culture of a company.”
Monteiro believes the human dimension underpins the very nature of the CHRO role today. “The CHRO has always been a senior advisor to the CEO, and I’ve seen CHROs that were very good at that. But, because they were very good at that, they didn’t have much trust among everybody else,” she reflects.
Today, that’s changing. “It’s not about ‘having a seat at the table.’ It’s about having courage and determination and enthusiasm, and caring for people,” Monteiro suggests. “CHROs should be more focused on influence, collaboration, and peer-to-peer relationships. We have to address the emotions that come up at work.”
On a personal level, leaders can feel the emotional strain of transition under pressure. Monteiro sees this as a key element of her role. “I have a very strong attachment to the purpose of what I do,” she says. “It gives me a lot of energy – even if there is some fatigue along the way.” She admits that CHROs can be stretched by the demands of today’s complex and fast-changing environment: “We are constantly struggling between what’s reasonable or what’s needed, and what’s asked for.”
Yet Monteiro is adamant that CHROs should avoid relapsing into old ways. “It would be easy to fall back into a way of thinking that’s based on processes, systems, and policies,” she warns. She is confident that HR will continue to evolve, even if the pace of change slows from that of recent decades.
Our added value will still be in human interactions and the emotions that need to be managed.
HR’s ability to understand employee experiences will receive potentially transformative support in the next few years. “I think AI will enable us to do things that we’re not able to do today – in a way that is both ethical and effective,” she says. Technology could, for example, help HR to develop employee career plans and training programs, highlight key development areas for managerial focus, and provide data analysis to support attraction and retention.
Nevertheless, CHROs should champion robust standards governing the use of AI. Monteiro is exploring those issues with colleagues in the technology function at ASML today. “Besides what the legislation will require of us, what boundaries should we set around the use of certain employee and organizational data?” she asks.
While a strong believer in new technologies, Monteiro sees the ‘people dimension’ remaining central to HR. “Our added value will still be in human interactions and the emotions that need to be managed,” she suggests. Workplace culture will also be at the heart of the future CHRO agenda. “HR will be very focused on the way we organize work and skills at the macro level, as well as workforce planning,” she says. Establishing the right culture and encouraging healthy workplace interactions will be critical.
Likewise, CHROs must understand technology and how to use the data they generate for HR decisions. At the same time, they should strive to retain the human touch. “We need to master human interactions, and we need to be better at that than any other function in the organization,” Monteiro states.
When people understand that you really care for them, and care about what’s happening, then they have a context for the challenges you raise.
Which three words would Monteiro use to describe the CHRO role? She alights on ‘enabling,’ ‘shaping,’ and ‘engaging.’ For her, enabling business, engaging people, and shaping organizations and culture represent the pillars of the CHRO role in any business.
Above all, she wants CHROs to be courageous. “If your mission and your purpose is to create the right impact for the organization, for people, and for leaders, it may require you to say something uncomfortable for you, the organization, or the team. But if it will help move the needle, then you should do it,” she says. “It’s okay to challenge.”
Difficult conversations, she points out, can be pivotal to helping people to grow. She recalls an executive who was struggling in a new role. Monteiro had to persuade their manager not to sidestep the issue. Providing robust, honest, and constructive feedback proved a turning point. “If we had just given him a ‘meets expectations’ rating, that leader would never have turned it around,” she recalls.
Crucially, that executive received support alongside constructive criticism, says Monteiro. It comes back to the CHRO’s purpose. “When people understand that you really care for them, and care about what’s happening, then they have a context for the challenges you raise,” she says.
Today’s CHRO must, then, be both courageous and challenging in pursuit of the purpose of benefiting both the business and its people. It is a winning formula for growing HR’s influence on business success.
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