Looking Ahead with Nathalie Parisel, Vice President, Nedco Canada

September 4, 2024

By: Owen Hurst, President, Kerrwil Media Limited

Over the years, Nathalie Parisel has developed a passion to help leaders access their full potential and create sustainable growth for their business, while always keeping in mind the well-being of the community and the environmental impact of their actions.

The strategic moves Nathalie has made throughout her career have given her a unique perspective on what it takes to realize change in organizations. She started working for large manufacturers like Honeywell and ABB, as a system engineer and project manager in the industrial automation sector. Through her MBA program, she discovered that one of her passions was transforming companies for better long term bottom-line growth.

In this regard, she decided to expand her knowledge via diverse industries best practices. Moved to the USA, worked at Prysmian under various roles in customer service, marketing, sales functions, to become a senior executive leader with teams across NA. Moved back to Canada, worked at Anixter in the Electrical distribution sector to finally started her consulting company before joined Nedco Quebec 2 years ago.

As a result of that commitment to diversifying her industry experience, Nathalie has transformed her leadership of performance base to a leadership of coaching and culture building, resulting in a consistent, proven track record of high performing financial results, better sustainable growth and better talent retention.

Nathalie fundamentally believes that each challenge can be resolved via the combination of mindset-process-interference as a guideline to generate creative options and solutions. It can be valid for talent mobility, strategic planning, relentless execution and operational efficiency in an organization. It also involves unlocking secrets to move beyond present limitations to accelerate growth and refining a culture that fits the vision and mission of the organization.

Question: I am aware of your slogan ‘Together we will surprise’. How does this slogan fit into your vision for our company’s future?

Answer: As many large size companies, one of our challenges is to remove silos within the organization. One way to do it, is to create this collaborative environment among the different departments and divisions. It is part of the culture change that I am trying to implement. I have developed a roadmap of continuous improvement projects and empower the people in different divisions and departments to implement across Canada regardless the divisions they are in. Now, how we will surprise. It is also link with the culture change. This requires promoting some values in all aspects of our work. I have chosen 3, which is Pride, Excellence and Innovation.

Question: What is Nedco aspiring to become?

Answer: We need to become the foremost transformative and agile distributor, dedicated to empowering our employes, customers and suppliers in their growth journey and swiftly adapting to technological advancements. This will be a hard journey but also exciting times!

Question:  What are the main goals to position Nedco as the top agile and transformative distributor?

Answer: To become a great company, you need minimum 3 pillars strategy … Something about People, Something about profitable growth strategies and something about efficiencies. All that supported with Company culture. We have defined a series of actions in each of those pillars.

Question: I am curious to know how you plan to encourage new ideas and continuous improvement here.

Answer: Few ways.

• Coaching in each formal and informal discussions and meetings
• Train the managers to become coach
• Create a safe environment to generate ideas along with good cadence for communicating and sharing best practices
• As far a continuous improvement, this is easy. We have an efficient and easy model that we are using

Question: How do you plan to help your employees grow and succeed?

Answer:

• First, bring a culture of caring and have zero tolerance if not followed.
• Second, have the discipline for weekly 1:1 meeting, monthly feedback and good annual review & career discussion
• Third, have the accountability to define a career path for each employee with good follow up … like a mentoring program
• Finally, search & invest in good training program

Question: How do you plan to build stronger relationships with your customers, suppliers and agents?

Answer: More Strategic. We are implementing a harmonized strategic plans process that has been successful in some divisions. We need to listen more to our customers and suppliers by being more present. That required discipline and cadence. Finally, we need to simplify our processes to improve our efficiency and become more agile.

Question: Interesting, what changes will you make to simplify your processes and improve efficiency?

Answer: Many companies are silos and spaghetti. We are not an exception. We need to work on initiatives to improve the customer experience and the operation efficiency. There are 4 pathways available to get there. We are chosen the one that we believe will create some immediate impact for our customers at the same time our internal teams are working on multiples initiatives related to improve our efficiency.

Question: How do you plan to stay quick and adaptable to new technologies and market changes?

Answer: I was lucky to attend a distributor conference last year and one slide was talking about benchmarking ourselves as a company and the 4 stages of possible evolution of the future in terms of sales and marketing. We have assessed our position and are now working toward moving to each stage on each topic. At the end our future is bright, and I am 100% confident that our team will create a great Nedco again. It is a question to have a direction, great communication, raising the level of engagement by empowering people and creating a great culture.

To learn more about Nedco Canada, visit their HERE.