“Using the knowledge and materials I got from the course, I’m trying to popularize the idea of women being in leadership in business”
Oleksiy Vadaturskyy founded agricultural producer and grain exporter NIBULON in Mykolaiv, Ukraine, in 1991. Guided by the principle of being as close to farmers as possible, Oleksiy built a strong network of grain storage and transshipment terminals, united by a logistics system encompassing road, rail, and one unique feature: its own river and sea-going fleet.
Like all Ukrainian companies, life changed utterly following Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022. Besides losing 30% of its agricultural land and 68% of its total assets, including many grain silos, Oleksiy and his wife were killed by a Russian bomb in 2022, and Andriy Vadaturskyy, their only child, took over the running of the company in August of that year.
For HR director and main board member Yana Romanenko, who was the second person to join the company after Andriy took over the reins, it was – and is – an incredibly challenging time. She reveals, “The company has suffered a lot of damage, both physically and financially. We are carrying a half-billion-dollar loss in debt to banks and financial institutions, which means we are going through a huge period of financial restructuring. The money was borrowed before the war to build infrastructure, but it’s very difficult to pay it back now. And our infrastructure is bombed almost every day – last week the Russians targeted one of our grain silos, which is only 20 kilometers from the frontline.”
Projects for women
The war has had a direct impact on the company in other ways. With more than 40% of the workforce unable to work, either because they are in occupied territory or are close to the frontline, and about 700 employees mobilized for the war effort, the company had to change its business model fundamentally, freezing marginal activities such as vegetable and food production, and focusing on profitable assets and business units.
With such a massive decrease in workforce numbers (NIBULON currently has seven employees per 1,000 hectares, compared to around 25 two years ago), great effort has been put into optimizing business processes, organizational structure, and automatization.
In response to the chronic shortage of mainly male personnel, Yana began to implement projects for women in the company, reskilling or upskilling them for jobs that in Ukraine were seen as non-female professions, such as truck driver, security guard, or machine operator. At first, the initiative was met with resistance: “It was very difficult at the beginning to convince our top managers that women can be good drivers of a huge grain truck,” she reveals. “I had to change their mindset [so they accepted] the new reality in Ukraine that you need to work with women, because half of our men will come back to business after work and won’t be able to work in the same positions.”
Despite the resistance, Yana persevered in her attempts to change the culture from the ground up: “The first driver who joined our team was a woman whose husband, who worked at NIBULON, thought she should stay at home and cook and bring up their child.” After some gentle persuasion, the ‘ordinary housewife’ was encouraged to become a driver “and now she’s the best woman driver in the company. We held a company anniversary and praised her for her results; she was so happy she cried. It’s just one thing but, step by step, we can change the culture and the mentality in the company.”
IMD- MIM leadership program
The joint leadership program Yana did at IMD and MIM Kyiv to equip women with the skills to run organizations was instrumental in her initiatives to retrain women at all levels. She says, “We significantly increased the percentage of women on our board and top team management and raised the overall percentage of women in the company by 10% compared to last year. It’s seen as my big victory!”
The chance to refine her soft skills was not the program’s only benefit, Yana adds: “I loved your learning platform and I’m using the provider to implement our LMS. And, of course, it’s been great professionally and personally to meet 40 interesting women leaders with deep experience and expertise in their fields.”
The program has also encouraged her to think big: “Using the knowledge and materials I got from the course I’m trying to popularize the idea of women being in leadership in business. I want to nurture Ukrainian women to become more powerful and to become leaders – in business, in government, and in society.”
Advancing the place of women in the workforce has deeper implications for Ukraine today than it would have done before the war, with nine million people having left the country and a staggering 80% of the population saying they’d like to leave, too.
It’s an exodus Yana is determined to help reverse. She says, “I feel that I’m not simply an HR director at NIBULON. My role as a leader is bigger and more powerful than I thought before, because we met with women in the group and found a lot of ways to impact the situation, using society, using government, using business to stop this outflow of Ukrainian people and our youth. The Ukrainian economy needs them.”
