First woman in the Bosch leadership resigns early

Filiz Albrecht

The 51-year-old is leaving the company after just over two years in office “for personal life and career planning reasons”.

(Photo: Bosch)

Stuttgart The head of human resources and the first woman on the top management of Bosch, Filiz Albrecht, is leaving the company early on March 31. She is not available for a contract extension from 2024, the 51-year-old is taking the step “at her own request and for reasons of personal life and career planning,” said the world’s largest automotive supplier on Thursday.

The manager, who came from the filter specialist Mann+Hummel, had been in office for just over two years. She was also responsible for environmental protection and sustainability, law, compliance management, information security and data protection and the Bosch business in India. At the top Bosch level, managers still have regional responsibilities.

She looks back on the years at Bosch with gratitude, said Albrecht. She said nothing about her future plans. Qualification measures for employees in the transformation to electromobility and smart work approaches fall within her short term of office.

“It fills me with pride that Bosch’s attractiveness as an employer has continued to increase and that the company is now a preferred employer in the field of software development,” said Albrecht.

“We expressly thank her for setting the important course in a phase marked by the pandemic, fundamental upheavals in our markets and digital transformation,” said Bosch boss Stefan Hartung. The head of the supervisory board, Stefan Asenkerschbaumer, also praised her “foresighted and empathetic approach,” and he respected and regretted her departure.

>> Read also: Bosch HR manager Filiz Albrecht uses these two questions to check whether a manager is a good fit

Personnel consultants, however, take a very critical look at such short tenures of top managers. In any case, the leap from the family company Mann+Hummel to a global corporation that is more than 20 times larger in terms of sales was a big one. No criticism was heard from the company. At Bosch, it can only be guessed at indirectly from the choice of successor.

Bosch: Stefan Grosch will be the new HR manager

With Stefan Grosch, 56, she is succeeded by a seasoned Bosch manager. The homegrown product has been with the automotive supplier for over 30 years, which recently posted annual sales of 88 billion euros.

After managerial positions in plants in Spain and Brazil, Grosch was responsible for corporate auditing at headquarters, before joining the management board of Robert Bosch Automotive Steering GmbH in 2017 as labor director with responsibility for finance and purchasing. Since October 2022 he has been a member of the divisional board in the Powertrain Solutions division, responsible for commercial tasks.

>> Read also: Employees demand future concept for all German Bosch locations

Apparently, skills are now required to calculate more precisely in personnel management. In Germany, thousands of jobs are on the brink in the entire automotive industry as a result of the transformation to electromobility – on the one hand, because significantly fewer workers are needed for the electric drive train than for the more complex combustion engines.

On the other hand, the cost pressure is increasing enormously because there are many more suppliers and therefore great price competition for the new orders. This in turn significantly increases the pressure to relocate abroad. None of these are easy tasks for the new HR manager and his colleagues in the industry.

Albrecht is not the only head of HR in the automotive supply industry who is no longer going ahead. Sabine Jaskula, 55, also announced in February that she would not renew her contract, which was due to expire at the end of the year. Jaskula came from Continental in 2019 and was the first woman to join the ZF Executive Board.

The same goes for Anke Felder, 50: she was the first woman to join Mahle’s management team. She had decided not to extend her three-year contract with the fourth largest automotive supplier, which expired at the end of 2022. Only Continental HR manager Ariane Reinhart, 53, is the constant among the HR managers of the four largest automotive suppliers.

More: VW is pushing into a billion-dollar market of suppliers like Bosch, Vitesco and Valeo – the competition is intensifying

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