Mohamed Tazir on culture, performance and the signals leaders cannot afford to miss
Mohamed Tazir
People & Culture Director, PALMARY FOOD
The best ideas I’ve seen implemented came from someone who does the job every day and had simply never been asked.
In this Leadership Gazette conversation, Mohamed Tazir reflects on why listening is a source of business intelligence, why culture is revealed under pressure, and why succession coverage may be the most consequential people metric a CEO can track.
1. How has your leadership philosophy evolved over the years?
The compass hasn’t moved. How I hold it has changed a lot.
When I started out, listening was mostly about the relationship—being there, understanding what people actually wanted rather than what I assumed they wanted, and building trust one conversation at a time. That mattered, and it still does.
But somewhere along the way, listening became something else for me: a way of seeing the business. When you sit with the people on the floor, you hear things a report will never tell you—a hesitation in someone’s voice about a machine, or a shift team mentioning, almost in passing, that a process “takes longer than it should.” Those are the small signals that tell you where the real problem is, usually months before it appears in the numbers. The best ideas I’ve seen implemented did not come from a strategy meeting. They came from someone who does the job every day and had simply never been asked.
Sharing went through the same shift. At the beginning, it meant passing on what I knew and being clear about what I expected. Now it means something harder. It starts with the “why.” If you reorganise a team and explain only the “what,” people comply; they do not commit. Explain the reasoning, and they can make good decisions on their own when you are not in the room.
Then comes the part that costs something: actually letting go. It means giving people real room to act, knowing some of it will go wrong, and making it safe enough that they try anyway. That is where I have watched people grow into leaders I never would have spotted on paper. It also means being straight with everyone—sharing the wins, but also the difficult moments, without dressing them up.
Models of work keep changing. Technical skill and a clear strategy will always matter. But over ten or twenty years, it is the human side that determines whether people stay and give you their best.
One thing I would insist on, though: none of this is about being nice. Listening and sharing are demanding. They take time, and sometimes they mean hearing things you would rather not. They are not the soft part of the job; they are the condition for performance that lasts.
2. What is one hiring mistake organisations still make despite advances in recruitment?
We have become very good at assessing whether someone can do the job, and we are still quite bad at asking whether they will want to stay. Everything in a modern process is built around the moment of selection—the screening, the tests and the structured interview. Then the person signs, and the machine moves on to the next requisition. Nobody is measuring what happens at day 30 or day 90. In our production sites, roughly a third of the people who leave do so within their first three months. That is not a retention problem. It is a hiring and onboarding problem wearing a retention costume. Those people were selected for the skills they had and lost because nobody prepared them for the reality of the shift, the pace or the team they were joining. The other version of the same mistake is hiring in your own image. We call it “culture fit,” and it quietly comes to mean “someone who thinks like us.” You end up with a very comfortable team that stops challenging anything. What you actually want is culture add: someone who shares the values but brings a way of seeing things you did not have. The fix is not a new tool. It is holding recruitment accountable for the 90-day survival rate, not just time-to-fill.
3. How do you maintain culture during periods of rapid growth or organisational change?
Culture is not the poster in the corridor. It is what people believe will actually happen when things get difficult: who gets promoted, what gets tolerated, and who gets heard when they raise a problem. So, in periods of change, I focus on three things. First, over-explain. In a reorganisation, silence is never read as neutral; people fill it with the worst version they can imagine. I would rather say, “Here is what we know, here is what we do not know yet, and here is when I will come back to you,” than wait until I have a clean answer. Second, watch the managers. Culture does not scale through the CEO’s speeches; it scales through what a shift supervisor does on a Tuesday morning. If you are growing fast, your bottleneck is not hiring people. It is producing enough managers who embody the culture. That is why we invest so heavily in management development. Third, protect a few rituals. When everything else is moving, the small fixed points matter more than people admit: how you welcome a new joiner, how you handle a safety incident, and how you say thank you. Those things cost almost nothing, yet they carry the message. And honestly, you have to accept that culture will change. It has to. What you protect is not the exact texture; it is the handful of non-negotiables underneath it.
4. How do you prevent burnout while maintaining high performance across teams?
I would start by saying that burnout is rarely a workload problem alone. People can carry a lot when the effort makes sense and they feel some control over it. What burns them out is intensity plus confusion, or intensity plus powerlessness.
The first lever is clarity. Half the exhaustion I have seen came from people redoing work, chasing decisions that never came, or not knowing what “good” looked like. That is not resilience; it is organisational friction, and it is ours to remove.
The second is the manager. It is usually a manager, not an HR dashboard, who notices that someone has gone quiet or that a normally meticulous person is starting to make mistakes. Our job is to train managers to see it and give them permission to act before it becomes an absence.
The third is watching the right signals. Absenteeism tells you what has already happened. I pay more attention to what happens before it: unused leave, chronic overtime concentrated on the same three names, or a team where every request lands on one person. Those are the early warnings.
And then there is the uncomfortable part: leaders have to model it. If I send messages at eleven at night, no policy I write will be believed. People do not follow what you publish. They follow what you do.
5. Which HR metric do you believe matters most to CEOs, and why?
If I could put only one number in front of a CEO, it would be the coverage of critical positions—the share of key roles that have at least one identified, prepared successor.
Turnover tells you the past. Engagement scores tell you a mood. This metric tells you whether the company can survive its own people leaving.
A CEO’s real fear is not a two-percentage-point rise in turnover. It is the plant manager who resigns on a Monday with nobody ready to replace him, or the supply-chain expert who holds knowledge that exists nowhere but in his head. Succession coverage translates directly into operational risk and, unlike most HR indicators, speaks a language the board already understands.
The second metric I would add—and this is where HR earns its seat—is cost per point of turnover. Not the percentage: the money. Recruitment, training, lost productivity and quality defects during ramp-up all carry a cost. The day you put a number on what turnover costs the business, the conversation about retention stops being an HR request and becomes a business decision.
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