Catalysts of change: Freudenberg’s Corporate Learning Director shares key lessons on stakeholder alignment

Freudenberg, a 175-year-old global conglomerate, faced a critical challenge: How do you build strong leadership capabilities in a highly decentralized company with 10 diverse business groups?

In the first episode of Lepaya’s Impact Lab, we sat down with Makoto Makabe, Freudenberg’s Director of Corporate Learning & Development, to explore how the company transformed its leadership development strategy, overcame internal resistance, and built a scalable, globally aligned framework.

Read on to discover Makoto’s insights on how L&D can break down silos and engage stakeholders to ensure that learning empowers meaningful, lasting change in the company.

When and why did you begin aligning leadership development across the Freudenberg Group? 

Freudenberg is unique—we have 10 business groups and operate in a highly decentralized way. This means that operational responsibility, including leadership and people development, rests largely with each business group. At the corporate level, our mandate is relatively narrow.

However, around 15–20 years ago, we faced a challenge. When senior executive positions opened up, we didn’t know if we had the right talent within our organization. At that time, Freudenberg had about 35,000 employees (compared to 53,000 today). If we couldn’t find talent internally, we would have a problem. But if the talent existed and we didn’t know about them, we also had a problem.

That’s when we introduced a global talent management process to create consistency across the organization. Until then, leadership development was entirely managed by each business group. But we wanted to have a say—at least for the top two leadership layers—at the corporate level.

What challenges did you face?

Naturally, this faced resistance. Business groups wanted to maintain full control and weren’t keen on corporate interference. However, the board of management pushed it through.

We started with a global talent review for the top two layers of leadership and gradually expanded it deeper into the organization. Through this process, we confirmed that we had strong leadership talent within Freudenberg. Given our diverse structure, we saw opportunities to develop talent across different business groups. 

However, this raised a new question: could we transition leaders from one business group to another? The answer wasn’t straightforward—because we didn’t share a common leadership language.

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That’s when the board proposed introducing executive development programs.[...] As we rolled out these programs, we worked closely with all the learning academies across Freudenberg. Through this, I realized that across all business groups, the number one priority was leadership development. So, I brought the academies together, forming the Freudenberg Learning & Development Community.

This was eye-opening. We had about 20 L&D professionals, yet many of them had never even met before. I asked them: If leadership development is a top priority for every business group, should it remain business-group-specific, or should we define a shared approach across Freudenberg?

That’s where the journey really started. We then developed a leadership framework—a model defining five distinct levels of leadership competencies.‍‍‍

Can you elaborate on some critical milestones and key success factors over the last 10 years of this journey?

The first important step was engaging the learning and development community in developing the leadership framework and designing the leadership development programs. That was a very good start.

One challenge we faced was complexity. The tendency in L&D was to make the framework too detailed—outlining every distinct level of leadership competence in a way that was overly complicated. But if it takes a senior leader more than five minutes to understand, it won’t work. My role was to keep it simple and ensure that anyone looking at the framework could grasp it quickly.

Once we had the framework in place, I was invited to present it to the Executive Council—the CEOs of the different business groups. 

We pitched the idea of aligning leadership development across all groups and having shared programs. Their response? A hard no.

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They completely rejected the idea and challenged me strongly. This experience made it clear how important stakeholder management is—it can be painful at times. But they invited me to come back in three months with a revised proposal.

How did you end up securing stakeholder buy-in?

I had one-on-one meetings with almost all of them, trying to understand what they had actually heard in my first presentation. Clearly, I hadn’t communicated the message well enough because what they understood was different from what I intended to say. These individual conversations gave me a chance to explain the real idea behind the initiative.

Three months later, I presented again. The content remained exactly the same, but I redesigned the slides and adjusted how I framed the message. This time, they approved it. And that is what we have in place today.

Since then, the program has continued to develop. In the beginning, we struggled with enrollment. 

But looking at the past two years, we now have 400–500 people participating in leadership development programs worldwide, with consistent enrollment across all regions. Today, I’d say it has become a well-oiled machine.

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Could you share your vision for the future? What challenges does the organization still need to overcome? And what are the next steps?

As I mentioned, enrollment in our leadership development programs has been steady and strong across the globe. However, there is one caveat.

Proportionally, we see higher enrollment in Europe, where the core of our organization has historically been. It seems easier to allocate a budget for leadership development here compared to other regions.

Our goal is to achieve a truly global balance, where one-third of our employees and revenue come from the Americas, one-third from Europe, and one-third from Asia. To support this, we need an even greater focus on leadership development in the Americas and Asia. [...] 

Another key learning from our leadership development programs—and also from our executive development programs—is that 50% of the value doesn’t come from the content itself. The real benefit comes from bringing people together in a room.

Half of what makes these programs valuable is not just the knowledge or insights delivered but the opportunity for senior leaders and executives to meet, engage, and discuss strategic or leadership topics together. That interaction is crucial for Freudenberg.

What we’ve learned is that this kind of learning experience shouldn’t be limited to leaders. It is valuable for all employees.

This led us to focus on what we consider the most important leadership level in the organization: leading yourself.

When you think about leading yourself, what skills are essential? We identified five key competencies: communication, conflict management, setting the right priorities, collaboration, and handling change.

While we do offer some programs in this area, it has not yet been a major focus. That needs to change.

In the near future, I want to expand this concept, making the experience of learning with colleagues from different business groups and functions available to everyone—not just leaders.

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That is the next big step I want to work on in the coming years.

And hopefully, in five or six years, we will see participation in leading yourself programs reaching the same level as our leadership development programs today.

To wrap up, what have you learned about breaking down silos in a decentralized company?

One thing I learned in sales is that selling truly begins when the customer says no.

So, if any of my colleagues from Freudenberg were listening right now, they might say, Makoto, we still have silos! And they’d be right. Silos still exist.

But the key question is: What exactly do we mean by silos? What are we experiencing? More often than not, what we call a silo is actually resistance to change.

Think about it—if everyone immediately supported your ideas and said, Yes, great idea! you wouldn’t even notice the silos. They simply wouldn’t exist for you. But when you face resistance, that’s when you recognize them.

And that’s the interesting part—if you truly want to drive change, you have to be prepared for pushback. Resistance isn’t an obstacle; it’s a natural part of the process. If you think meaningful change can happen without resistance, well, I’ve never seen that before.

Change, by definition, requires people to adjust their behaviors. If a change doesn’t demand any behavioral shift, it happens naturally—people just do it. But when great ideas aren’t immediately embraced, it means something is at stake for the people involved.

And that’s what a stakeholder is—someone who has something at stake. So, the real question is: What are we asking people to give up? Who needs to pay the price for this change?

And that’s where I think we in L&D have an advantage. We understand the theories behind change, we know how it works, and we just need to apply that knowledge to our own work.

We have to be ready for resistance—and that’s okay. In fact, resistance gives you something to work with. It gives you a handle to grasp and navigate the change process.

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That would be my advice—embrace the resistance, engage with it, and use it to drive meaningful change.

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