Rising to tomorrow’s challenges through innovative leadership
Anna-Maria Karl focuses on future leadership skills to transform the world of work
Dr Anna-Maria Karl, LLM, studied law at LMU Munich and the University of Geneva and was a researcher at the Institute before she earned her doctoral degree at the University of Hamburg. She then earned an LLM at the University of Michigan Law School and completed several executive training programs, including at the University of Southern California and INSEAD. She has held various leadership positions in the automotive industry. Today she heads the HR Executives Practice Group at Kienbaum Consultants International.
Not only is Anna-Maria Karl an institute alumna, but she has also stayed involved as a member of the Board of Trustees, an all-volunteer body that bridges the Institute’s research and the public interest. Karl’s career is an example of the breadth of professional roles that a law degree can lead to when combined with an international orientation, an openness to new roles, and a committment to always learning new things.
“If I could do it all again, I would choose law every time”, says Karl, who is a human-resources expert. “The study of law teaches a way of thinking that has stayed with me throughtout my career.” Her stint as a doctoral student at the Institute also made a lasting impression on her. “Working with foreign legal orders makes you question your own system, in a positive sense. It encourages you to look at things from a different perspective.” Her dissertation dealt with a question of Spanish law. But she had already started developing her foreign language skills as school pupil. “I used to devote whole weeks of my school vacations to various language courses.” By the time she took up her university studies in Munich, she was already proficient in English, French and Spanish. In Munich, she was exposed to eastern European legal systems for the first time, and she embraced the study of Russian, which she continued to pursue in Geneva on a scholarship from the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD).
Karl landed her first job in the legal department at Daimler AG, where she worked a portfolio covering Western Europe and Latin America. She spent the next ten years focussed only on law; one of her stations was as Head of Legal for the automotive marque Smart. After that, she decided to go into human resources. Her first role in that field was as a diversity officer in the Mercedes-Benz Cars division, where she took an expansive view of her responsibilities: “I would often find myself explaining that diversity is about more than women’s issues.” She proceeded to develop talent management, mentoring and recruiting programs. As a next step, she set up an initiative for the education of children and adolescents, called “Genius – die junge Wissens-Community von Daimler” [the Daimler young knowledge community]. She also was in charge of a program at Daimer called “Academic Education and University Relations”, which crafted company policy on university outreach. Ultimately she became Head of Global Talent Sourcing at Daimler, a leadership role in which she was able to have a substantial impact: “We set up ambitious programs that allowed us to recruit excellent people from all over the world.”
Five years ago, she – mother of four adult daughters, by the way – made a significant change in her own professional development: She left Daimler to take up a new and different position as an HR and management consultant with Kienbaum Consultants International, where she is a partner and a director. She now advises businesses and other organizations on how to fill their own HR leadership roles, in the conviction that, in her words, “In light of the fundamental changes happening in today’s workplace, the HR department of any organization will be a crucial factor. Whenever an organization succeeds at transforming itself, a major component of that success will have been the people responsible for personnel. For Karl, creativity, willingness to change, an entrepreneurial attitude, adaptability, resilience, and problem-solving ability are the skills on which everything depends. And she herself has proven time and again the principle that it’s worthwhile to continually develop one’s skill set.
Image: © Max Planck Institute for Comparative and International Private Law
