Laura Overall, Senior Vice President Communications CNH , Basildon (UK).
Last summer, we were invited to Basildon (UK) for a visit to the New Holland plant and to see the new CR10 and CR11 combines at work. However, while that was the main reason for our colleagues’ visit, we were there to meet Laura Overall, the Senior Vice President of Communications. While the big machinery roared in the fields, we had a chat with Laura about being a woman in power at an iconic brand.
Growing up in the south-east English countryside around Fiatagri tractors, Laura Overall always knew she wanted to work in communications at a Fiat company. Her career started in the UK press office of luxury automaker Maserati in 2007, after which she moved on to the former CNH Global as a corporate communications specialist and later the global Corporate Communications Manager. A little over three years ago, during her maternity leave, the company asked her to take up the role of Senior VP of Communications. A very uncharacteristic move in the corporate world, based on the company’s faith in her capabilities, that landed Laura her dream job.
Laura, tell us a little bit about yourself.
I’m Laura Overall, I’m the Senior Vice President of communications at CNH. I’ve been with the company around fifteen or so years. I don’t come from a direct farming family but I grew up in the countryside and my grandfather worked on a farm, so I’ve always been attracted to agriculture.
I have a small daughter, Henrietta: she’s three years old. I also have a husband and his family have come from a farming family in Ireland: there’s one side which has an arable farm and the other side that has a dairy farm. So when we need to take our vacations, we’d always be put to work on the farm…
In my work for the company I’ve lived in Italy for four years. I started out in internal communications, then I went into commercial training, so I was teaching salesmen how to sell tractors, and then since 2014, I’ve worked in the corporate office.
Did you study agriculture?
No, I studied languages: French and Italian, and I studied Italian because I wanted to work for Fiat Group for the very simple reason that the nearest farm to me had Fiatagri tractors and then I became really into Formula One. I liked the Ferrari’s, it was the era of Michael Schumacher, and I always said “one day I’m going to do communications and I’m going to do it in a Fiat Group company”. So if you like, I’ve got my dream job: I work in a Fiat Group company in agriculture.
Did you learn new things about agriculture through your job?
Absolutely. I think working in communications, you always get to peek behind the curtain. We’re always the ones that are finding out first about innovation and about new products because it’s on us to communicate those. What stories do we want to tell? In order to be able to tell those stories, we have to talk to the engineers, we have to talk to the product development team, we have to talk to the designers, the innovation teams,… so I feel like I’m always learning about new things from our talented team of engineering. But also I think just talking with farmers all over the world, there’s always an aspect of farming and agriculture that is new because it’s not stationary, it’s always developing. There’s new technology or new approaches, and sometimes it’s rediscovering things that have been forgotten about. Talking to a farmer in New Zealand, Australia, Thailand… you think, “oh, I didn’t know that”. There’s always something to learn inside our company and there’s always something to learn from the people who are in agriculture, whether it’s the dealers, our customers or in the broader agrifood sector. I know everyone says that, but I really do learn something every day!
And then you translate that to something that is palatable to the public.
Yes, and it depends on who you’re talking to, really. I see my two main stakeholders as our employees and then there’s the external media. So when we’re talking to employees, it’s about celebrating the great stuff we’re doing as a company because it can be very easy in a company of 40,000 people to not know what’s going on. Getting people enthused about what we’re doing and celebrating their success is really, really important.
And then externally, it’s about how you translate sometimes quite technical documents or real cutting edge science into a story that someone understands and gets that aha moment and thinks “yeah, this is important to me and this is the benefit it’s driving or the impact it’s having”. So translating numbers and hard facts into engaging stories is part of my job.
How is the perception of women in your line of work and in agriculture in general?
I would take the two slightly separately.
I think that the role of women in agriculture more generally is changing. Before, it was always the farmers’ wife who came with the picnic, and now there are a growing number of women in their own right at the head of agribusinesses. They might be farmers, they might be those that take care of the value added tasks on the farm or they might be agronomists or other support services. Do we have enough of them? No. But are we getting there? I think so.
My line of work is communications and generally more women do communications than men. However, normally the head of communications is a man. Our company believed in investing in a young new mother and making her the head of communications.
Something that I’m really passionate about is being an ally and a mentor and a coach to women in the organisation, not just in communications. Generally communications, HR and legal are women, but now we had the first female president of a region in Chun Woytera, former president of our Asia Pacific region. She’s the first woman to have profit and loss accountability for a region. We’ve got more senior women in technology roles, more senior women in finance roles, … We are seeing women popping up in the male dominated areas and I believe that you have to see it to be able to want to be it. That’s why I really think it’s important not to be celebrating these women because they’re women. I didn’t get this job just because I was a woman. What’s important is to celebrate them for their achievements so that is the validation of that choice and then hopefully people coming up in the organisation will be like “hey, Laura’s done it, Chun’s done it. I can do it”. Seeing others do it, irrespective of being a woman, being a mother, having caring responsibilities and knowing you can do it.
So if we ask you what could be done to bring about a positive change, you would say just more women taking up jobs like yours?
I think that is part of it. It’s women ourselves who have to have that positive attitude and think “I can do it” because I know that if there’s a job description with ten points, women expect to have to be able to satisfy all ten to apply for the role whereas men have like three or four and then apply anyway. My view is that as women, we have to be brave and courageous and take that plunge, because if you don’t, you don’t know what you’re missing out on. And even if it isn’t for you, you’ve had a massive experience and a massive skill set that you can then transfer.
That’s one side and the other side is having companies, like CNH, who are willing to give people who don’t look like they always have in the past in these roles a chance. It would be easy to default to a man as head of communications, a man as head of a region instead of…. I don’t even want to say taking a risk, because it’s not taking a risk on these people since we’re really good at our job. It’s just having that courage to be open, do something differently and promoting it. When we’ve got these women in roles, we have to celebrate it because it’s really if you see it, you can be it. I think those are the two main factors that are very important to drive change.
New Holland hired you while you were on maternity leave. That’s uncommon, isn’t it?
Yes, and I’m proud of that! People are like, “really your company did that?” And I would answer “well, why wouldn’t they?” I think being a mother has made me be a better manager. I’ve become a lot more empathetic and also I’ve become a lot more aware of work-life balance.
The way I see it, I compare it to when farmers go and harvest. In harvest season, you work eighteen or twenty hours a day because you have to get your harvest in, but you don’t harvest for twelve months of the year, so there’s times which are quieter. I’m the same with how I approach it with my team. There’s a job that has to be done and you have to get it done, but I give my team pretty much whatever flexibility they want to manage their workload and I do that myself as well. I work, then I take two hours off because I go and collect my daughter, I give her a bath and then I go back to work in the evening because that works for me and it works with my American colleagues.
People have lives and I think you retain the best talents by making work work for you. And it can look different for everybody. You’ve got commuting time, you’ve got caring responsibilities, you’ve got time zones in a big company like ours. I’ve got team members in Shanghai and team members in Chicago. So if Nan is on a call at 10:00 at night, I’m like “come in late in the morning”, or Rebecca has to get up at 6:00 AM for a team call , I will tell her “finish at 2:00. It’s fine. Make it work for you”. And I tell you, when you do that, your team pays it back. Because if I have to call them up at 10:00 on Christmas Day, they’ll pick up the phone because they know it’s urgent and they feel respected. They give me that respect and I give it back again.
Women are more used to negotiating, aren’t they?
I think women are very good at it. I mean, there’s the old thing, isn’t there? I can’t remember who said it, but it says “if women ruled the world, there’d be no wars”.
To get the best out of people you have to understand people. I don’t just talk to my team about work: I’m interested in their life, what’s going on. I know one of my team members has an elderly father who she has caring responsibilities for, other members of my team are mothers, others have other stuff that is going on. One of my male team members is buying a house, for example. I don’t need to be like, “oh, they haven’t got children, so it’s not important”. It’s what is important to each individual and making them feel valued and actively asking about it. That’s when I really think you get the most from people.
And then you’re able to give them the support they need to keep them motivated.
I am quite a caring and empathetic manager. A lot of CEOs say “our people are our greatest resource” and to them it’s a tick in the box, but I really believe it. I’m very switched on if people are looking tired, if they’re looking a bit down… when we are in the team call and someone who always talks, doesn’t or someone who is quite quiet suddenly becomes very talkative. When there’s something that’s not quite right, something that’s going on, I will pick up and go “hey, if you want to talk, I’m here. You don’t have to say anything. We can sit in silence. You can chat to me or you can say to me, Laura, I don’t want to talk to you, but I want you to know that I’m here for you because I think that’s the best thing a manager can be, is there for their team.”
You’ve touched on a very important subject: mental health. There is a problem in agriculture, isn’t there?
Yes, because it’s very isolating. If you’re sitting in a tractor for sixteen hours a day, if you’re getting up at 4:00 AM everyday to milk your cows and you’re on your own, that’s quite lonely.
You’re effectively the CEO of a very complex company that has a lot of volatility and you’re doing it sometimes in very remote places and away from everything.
Are there many women in a similar job to yours and do you have contact with them?
There are other women in communications. As I said, they tend not to be the head of communications, even if communications is generally quite a female dominated sector. Within our company we’re very connected in. I talk to my peers and I talk to the broader communications teams. I look after corporate communication, but whether it’s the brands or the business sectors, when I took this role, I established a communications community within CNH so that everybody could talk, share best practise, share ideas, just support each other.
Outside of CNH, probably not as much as I would like. It’s always so busy, so you’ll see people at the trade shows but it’s otherwise just sort of working in your own business. But within the company, we are a pretty tight bunch.
Are there specific initiatives in place for women at CNH?
Yes, there’s a couple of things. The first thing is that we have a target of a 20% of senior leaders being women by 2024. We’ve established that at our 2022 Capital Markets Day and we’re making significant progress towards that. That’s at the senior executive level. And then we have a range of employee resource groups (ERGs). There’s groups specifically focused on equality and networking and it’s for anyone who wants to join, so even in our female employee resource groups we have a lot of men there because you need allies, which is really important. This is focused on women at the early stage of their career and career advice. Later on in your career, there’s being a coach or a mentor to these women, we have those in all four of our regions and then we have other ad hoc mentoring or coaching programmes for high potential employees, people we might want to put on the fast track.
So I’d say CNH is becoming more diverse. I mean, I’ve been with the company fifteen years. There’s certainly more women now because, like I said before, there’s more senior women. Before there was a bit of a glass ceiling, but now we have women on the global executive team, there’s more women vice presidents,… I mean, I’m senior vice president!
Before, the women were more the lower level, white collar jobs, maybe a mid-level manager. There were very few senior managers, a few but not many. And now we’re getting towards our target of 20% and it’s very visible and it’s great to see. I want more, but you know, you have to start somewhere and Rome wasn’t built in a day. The other thing is the women that are there, they’re not there because they’re women, they’re there because they’re good at their job.
And maybe they don’t feel the pressure to behave like men would in those higher level roles.
I think you have to be your authentic self, you know? You have to operate within the confines of your company. There’s a company culture: if I work at CNH it’s one way, if I worked at Microsoft, it’s a different way. If I worked at Johnson and Johnson, it’s different again. So I think change comes from the inside, but it doesn’t mean that because you’re now a team executive you have to cut your hair short and wear a male business suit and drink loads of beers and talk about football. Not that our managers do that (laughs) but you have to be your authentic true self. And I see the senior women in our company… we’re just ourselves.
You’ve been with CNH for fifteen years. What can you tell us about the evolution of women at CNH?
One thing is to point out there’s more of us. The company was very much a man zone when I came and they were very small pockets, HR, communications, maybe a little bit of legal, where there were women but that was probably it. I remember when I became a commercial trainer – I was teaching salesmen how to sell a tractors – that would have been in 2010: I was the only woman on the team.
How were you perceived?
To start with, I was young at that stage. I was 26. My colleagues knew that I was good at my job because, you know… they worked with me every day. I don’t ever feel like inside the company I’ve been seen as a woman, I’ve just been seen as Laura. And everyone knows I do what I say I’m going to do and I do it well. I’m committed to my work.
I remember the first time I did training though… I won’t say where in Europe, but I stood up on the stage and you could just see these people think “what is she going to teach me? I’ve been selling tractors for 50 years. She’s not going to be able to teach me anything.” You have to know I was doing the Tier 4A engine emissions so not just agriculture, but engines in agriculture, and I super prepared myself for it, but they started to chat on it. And then people would listen and I got two responses. One was like “bloody hell, you’re good at your job”, which in a way was like… Why are they saying that, of course I am! It was a bit offensive but at least there was recognition for my work. Other people I’ve had to throw out because they just did not want to listen to what I had to say. Ever since then, I sort of got this bit of a reputation because I was good at my job and they knew that if they came to my training session, they were going to learn something. I stood no nonsense, but I would take any question, any feedback, so it was challenging, it was tough. Like I was saying before, I wasn’t 100% qualified for the role when I got it. I got that job because I spoke languages, they needed someone who could train in French, in Italian and in English. But you can learn! I didn’t know anything about engines; I learnt about engines. I learnt about emissions regulations and I broke those barriers and in some ways I would say people learned more because it was something different, I had a different style.
Fast forward fifteen years, there’s a lot of women in technology, in precision farming, in the technology organisation. It’s Claudia Campanella who’s running the ergonomics and human machine interface. Lisa Jackson, who’s doing UI UX, Francesca Protano, who’s running our R&D competence centres,… there are women in non-traditional female roles. Our chair, Lady Heywood, is a woman. She’s the chair of CNH and she’s the chair of Iveco Group and she’s the Chief Operating Officer of Exor. She’s a super bright woman, super engaged and no one ever sees her as Lady Heywood, the woman: they see her as Lady Heywood. To me she’s an example to all of us. She’s a mother, she’s got three children, and she has so many jobs and she does them all super well.
And that’s what I mean, you know? I’m not saying I’m ever going to become the chair of CNH, but it’s that if I wanted to, I could. Because I’ve got that role model to look up to.
What’s New Holland’s standpoint on inclusivity and diversity?
I think New Holland and CNH as a company value people, and if you are committed to delivering excellence for our customer, that is what matters. So whether you’re a woman, whether you’re a man, whether you’re someone who’s retiring at the age of seventy, or a new entrant at twenty-one, our company is a broad church and we value individuals and the contribution that they bring to the broader mission of CNH. If you’re signed up to making great products that deliver for our customers, are open to feedback and want to drive our business forward, that is what matters and the rest of it is what makes you an individual. I myself as a manager value individuals. You can be yourself at CNH as long as you are delivering on those company goals.
What do you notice with other companies? Do you see steps being taken in terms of inclusivity there?
With the competition I don’t know, I can only speak for CNH. Like I said we’ve got a focus on women, we started a disability ERG so looking at how we can make adaptations for disabled people in our production sites, working on the production line or in other office based jobs. Then there’s examples like our accessible tractor in Brazil. So not just looking at what we’re doing inside, but how we can deliver that for our customers.
I think the most successful companies are companies which have a diversity of thought in them because you don’t get that group think and you need to have respectful challenge, but you need to listen and not take a knee jerk reaction but really think about things from different perspectives.
Do you have initiatives regarding mental health and how does that translate on the workflow?
I think that’s managed I would say on country level through our human resources function, generally. There might be targeted initiatives in different parts of the world depending on a specific need. But we do have resources: we call it CNH Ilearn, it’s our learning resources centre. There are resources which we can be consulted by anyone in the company, we all have access to it and then that will be a different conversation with either your human resources or with your manager.
If you could start your own farm, what would you do?
So when I’ve won the lottery… (laughs) Particularly in the Southeast of England it’s not cheap to become a farmer, but it’s something my husband and I often talk about. We would buy a large arable farm and we’d obviously have all Case IH and New Holland tractors. But I’d also like to have like some sheep, definitely horses.
My husband is a machinery nut, he works for New Holland as well so we’re the perfect CNH couple. He could be off driving his tractor, doing his combining. But I would like for my family, and particularly for my daughter to grow up knowing that we are doing something which matters and is meaningful. We are growing food to feed the world. It would be a beautiful farm, with a lovely farmhouse, I would like some sheep… I don’t think I want pigs. They’re just too labour intensive, I couldn’t cope with that. But sheep speak to me and I can imagine a pony for my daughter, a nice kitchen garden… The quintessential English romantic farm, which is not going to be romantic when you do it because there’ll be rain and fertiliser prices! But definitely the CR11 combine, a nice T7 tractor, definitely a CNH fleet and here in the Southeast of England. That’s where I grew up. I’ve worked in Italy, I’ve travelled a lot, particularly, at university with my languages, through work, through vacation. But I grew up in the countryside and I just feel very rooted here, even though we don’t have a farm. This feels like home to me, this landscape. To me this is home: these fields, these skies, this is where I want to be.
So definitely a farm in England. I think one of the missions of the UK is looking at food security and I think farming has a massive role to play in that. I don’t think autarchy is the right way to go but farmers make food for the population and I think it is nice to be able to go to the supermarket and say oh, this is British lamb, that’s made with British flour, do you think I might have driven by that field? These are people who’ve given their lives, because farming isn’t a job, it’s a way of being. It’s not nationalism, right? But it’s the pride of, you know, these people. They’ve worked hard, they’ve given it their all. So if I can have the choice between New Zealand lamb or British lamb, I’m going to choose British lamb.
Do you have any advice for Henrietta or a young woman who would like to start in farming?
I would say just try it. Any opportunity that presents itself, just give it a go because if you don’t try, you’re only saying no to yourself. You’re not even letting someone say no to you. First of all, you’ve got to overcome that. One is take the plunge. Two is don’t worry about “am I the right person? Do I fulfil these ten bullet points?” Because you might not fulfil those ten, but you’ve got another ten you can bring to the job, that the person writing the job description didn’t think about but when they meet you, actually that’s as important or more important.
A third thing is I think farming is very broad, it’s not just being a farmer. I studied languages and I went into communication. I worked in agriculture, but there’s seed, there’s agronomy, there’s farm finance, there’s farm conservation, there’s net zero, there’s all of those centralised functions in big companies like ours, Logistics, HR, legal and purchasing. Agriculture in its broader sense touches a lot of different and meaningful sectors. I say if you’re passionate about something, just go for it, because it’s only you that holds you back and the sky really is the limit. I grew up as a little girl in a single parent household in the countryside, and I now have my dream job! I never in a million years thought I’d get there, but I did different things and just took a chance on myself.
So I would say to Henrietta: if you want to go into agriculture, it is one of the most rewarding careers and you can do whatever you want. Because only you will make the success or only you will hold you back. And Henrietta will definitely be a success!
What is your hope for women in agriculture?
The ultimate goal for me is there shouldn’t need to be a Women in Ag or a Women in Ag Award. It should just be the AG awards because at the end of the day it should just be the person’s skills and the benefits that they bring that speak. Whether you’re a man or a woman, whether you’re from north or South America or Europe, if you grew up in a country house or you grew up as a prince or a king, it should just be people in agriculture. That’s when you know you’ve got success. But I’m not blind, I know that at the moment you have to put a spotlight on it, people need to see it to be it. And maybe who knows? Twenty, thirty, maybe one hundred years from now – I hope not a hundred, I hope it’s a lot shorter – these “women in ag” initiatives will have become obsolete.
I think you’ll know you have been successful when there is no longer a need for this magazine. But until such time initiatives such as Women in Ag Mag are so important because we need to let young women in agriculture know “I’m not just the farmer’s wife”. If you want to do that, that’s totally fine as well. If you want to be a housewife and a mother,… that is totally fine too.
I’m very ambitious and very career minded and that’s what I wanted to do. If I look at my mum or even my nan, they just wanted to be mothers. And I have no judgement on that and my mum, to me, was the best mum ever. Some people say “oh, she could have gone to university” or “she left school at sixteen” like she hasn’t succeeded at life, but success looks different to different people. One-size-fits-all doesn’t work. So that’s why again, it’d be nice if this magazine didn’t need to exist because we should be able to have male farmers who want to look after the kids and the woman, their partner or their wife goes out and does all the machinery: that should be just totally normalised. Why should it have to be a male breadwinner? As long as it’s an equal partnership, that’s what really counts, and that doesn’t mean making everything the same. I think everything should be valued for their talents, irrespective of anything else.
Traditional stereotypes are so outdated now and people have to feel fulfilled in what they are doing. So if that looks like working twenty hours a day on a spreadsheet to you because you love spreadsheets, I’m OK with that. Don’t bore me with that because I’m not going to ever do that, I would go crazy! But then people would say that for my job, while it gives me a lot of happiness and fulfilment. Do your thing. If my daughter wants to be Prime Minister or a teacher or if she wants to work in a supermarket, be a farmer or a housewife, as long as it’s her choice and she’s happy. I think that’s the most important thing.
This article was published in Women in Ag Mag 2024-004. Click here to read the magazine
