 |
MICHAELA CHRASTNÁ
Role: R&D Project Manager, Facility Manager, Construction Manager, External Relations Manager, HR Work Process Leader, Process Engineer Area: Project Management, HR, Construction Employer: Lego; former: Procter & Gamble, Zentiva Mentoring language: czech Mentees: students, employees Form: Online, Personal meet up
|
Michaela was an active member of the IAESTE association during her studies at UCT Prague, and she was the main coordinator of the iKariéra fair and even became the head of the local centre. This experience shaped her to a large extent, and Michaela realised that she wanted to pursue a technical-industrial path after finishing university. Therefore, she accepted an internship at Procter & Gamble, where she ended up working for 11 years. She started as a process engineer in production, and she was in charge of packaging lines. After a while, she was offered the opportunity to move within the company to the position of press spokesperson to which she later on added a part of the HR agenda.
After maternity leave, she returned to the company as a project manager, where instead of managing production lines, her job was to build them. Several international projects passed through her hands, including the installation of a production line in Saudi Arabia, but as a woman she never obtained a visa and managed the entire project remotely. During her second maternity leave, when she lived partly in Slovakia as part of a split family, Michaela worked part-time and managed a large construction project to remove a hill behind the factory in Rakovník and build a new entrance to the factory.
The successful approval of the new entrance was the symbolic icing on the cake of a long career, and Michaela subsequently moved from a project position to an operational position at Zentiva, where she worked as a Facility Manager, to which she eventually added the position of Head of Metrology, Qualification and Validation. After two years, she felt it was time for a change: "I know about myself that I am not a 'run-the-business' but a 'change-the-business' person. I've always more or less worked with the long-term horizon. I wondered what was going to happen in three years, five years. I wasn't a person who was extremely long on the day-to-day operations, the day-to-day management." At this point, Michaela joined Lego as a technical project manager in the R&D department.
"I've been in a position where I've recruited people a few times, and I've always looked for something to set them apart. The university provides an excellent education, but it's just some basics. You need to develop, and I think the pressure is getting greater and is definitely greater now than it was during my student years." For example, Michaela attributes her activity in the student organization to the fact that she has learned to take care of people and motivate them to do a good job. In positions of leadership, and often in all-male teams, she has always relied on humility, trying to take good care of her colleagues and listening to them. She would advise students not to be afraid to leave what they majored in and go into another field. For her, the desire to pass on gained knowledge is natural: "You want to leave something behind, and I find that investing in people is the most beneficial."