Lea Klauk: Connecting the dots

Lea Klauk, Körber site: Hamburg, Germany

When people ask me what I do at Körber, I sometimes joke:
I bring people together to learn from each other.

On paper, my role sounds a bit different. I work in Talent & Culture, develop employee programs, and focus on leadership, learning, and our company culture.

But honestly, it always comes down to one thing:
Getting people into meaningful conversations with each other.

At Körber, people from very different backgrounds work side by side – from engineering, software development, production, and sales to communications and marketing – across the globe.

Different cultures.
Different perspectives.
Different ways of thinking.

That’s exactly what makes Körber so exciting.

One question keeps coming back in my work:

How do we create spaces where people truly learn from each other?

I’ve seen that the most interesting conversations happen when people connect who would otherwise never have met in their day-to-day work.

That’s how our internal mentoring program started.
We deliberately bring together people who would, in all likelihood, never have crossed paths.

An engineer who wants to understand sales.
An experienced manager curious about how younger colleagues think and work today.
A project manager in Europe and a colleague in Asia, eager to broaden their intercultural perspective.

What happens next is fascinating every single time.

What I enjoy most about this program are the moments we can’t plan.

When people start to bring the program to life themselves.

When someone says:
“I’d love to be a mentor again.”

Or when someone tells me:
“I met someone through the program. We talked – and suddenly I saw things completely differently.”

In those moments, I realize:
This is more than a program.
It’s a culture where people learn and grow together.

For me, that may be the most important insight from all these experiences:

The best ideas rarely come from one person.

They emerge when people share different perspectives.
When someone asks a question.
When someone has the courage to say, “I don’t know – can you explain it to me?”

That’s exactly what I love about my work at Körber.

We learn from each other.
We grow together.

And sometimes, all it takes is one conversation to completely change the way we see things.