|
|||
|
|
|
||||||
|
And Now for Something Completely Different
Michael Peel is making the transition from corporate America to academia. One of the biggest differences between GM's boardroom world and the world of Yale University is the style of leadership, he says. After more than three decades climbing the HR ladder at PepsiCo and General Mills, Michael A. Peel felt himself being pulled away from corporate America. "I wanted to do something completely different," he says. So shortly after his plans to retire as chief human resources officer at General Mills were made public, he got a call from Richard Levin, president of Yale University, where Peel had been a member of the president's advisory board on workplace diversity from 2005 through 2007. "And the pieces just dropped into place," he says. On Oct. 1, Peel was appointed vice president for human resources and administration for Yale University in New Haven, Conn. "Yale is an important institution at an important time in its history, and the opportunity to work with Rick and his talented leadership team was simply one I couldn't pass up," he says. Yale University President Richard C. Levin says the university is "immensely fortunate to have attracted to Yale one of the nation's leading human resource professionals. We are delighted to have Mike Peel as a colleague and a leader." One of the biggest differences between the boardroom world and the classroom world is the style of leadership, Peel says. "Here, you lead a lot through influence and ideas, and less through chain-of-command and organizational power" as is more common on the corporate side. Peel adds that, while there are other differences between the corporate and academic worlds, "success at both is determined by their ability to attract and retain the very best people, individually and collectively, [and have such people] contribute to the maximum of their potential." Despite his vast experience in HR, Peel acknowledges that "the HR strategies that will work best at Yale will be unique to Yale and [are] not transported from a corporate environment." Universities, he says, have typically had far less-evolved human resource organizations due to their size and the tendency for such organizations to be fragmented. "Often totally missing are the talent-management systems to forecast future talent needs, to fully understand the current talent depth in the organization, and the action plans necessary to close the gaps," he says. "We obviously need a more sophisticated system to do that, and that will be a primary goal of mine." Peel's plans also include improving Yale's processes for helping employees map out their career paths. Peel joined General Mills as a senior vice president for worldwide human resources in 1991, and was named executive vice president in 2007, with responsibility for worldwide human resources, global business services, real estate/facilities, health services, safety, environmental compliance and travel. He is also a trustee of the General Mills Foundation. Prior to joining General Mills, Peel spent 14 years at PepsiCo, where he held a number of senior-level HR positions. Peel received an M.B.A. in finance from Columbia Business School. He is a member of the board of directors and vice chair of the Human Resources Policy Association, and is also a member of the board of directors and chair of the management development and compensation committee of Select Comfort Corp. In 2002, he was elected a Fellow of the National Academy of Human Resources. He was elected to the Academy's board of directors in 2005 and currently serves as secretary/treasurer.
January 1, 2009 Copyright 2009© LRP Publications |
||||||
Print
Email
Write to the Editor
Reprints
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
|
© Copyright 2010 LRP Publications. All rights reserved.
|
||||