DEI, global regulations, upskilling, performance metrics: the challenges facing global businesses are bigger than ever.
Everyone wants a high-performing team, but it’s not always clear what that looks like in practice — so we asked The Herd, Zinc’s community of forward-thinking HR, people, and talent pros.
On 18th September, we all gathered at Techspace Shoreditch for a conversation with leaders in the TA and HR space:
- Emi Berdugo, Senior Manager Recruitment Enablement at Elastic
- Kameka McLean, Group Head of HR at investment management firm Walker Crips
- Rebecca Oldham, Director of Talent Acquisition at Mastercard
To kick things off, we asked our audience: In one word, what does a high performing team look like to you in 2025?
We got lots of great answers, including “efficiency”, “engaged”, “motivated”, and “adaptable”. Whatever the answer, it was clear that being able to pivot and stay flexible was a must-have for everyone.
And with those answers top of mind, we dove into the discussion.
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Upskilling your workforce in the age of AI
The first element of a high performing global team is having the skills to compete in a changing global market — even if those skills haven’t been around for very long.
At Mastercard, Rebecca told us about how she’s hiring for roles that didn’t even exist a year ago. From prompt engineers to agentic commerce specialists, her approach to building teams in a brand-new talent pool leans heavily on building internal talent.
For their first time hiring a prompt engineer, they worked closely with a hiring manager to list out the skills the new hire would need.
“We’re co-creating with the business on the skills they’re going to need over the next 6, 12, and 18 months,” Rebecca said. “We’re hiring for skills that don’t exist in the external market, and thinking about the transferable skills that make it viable for the future.”
While they did look at a broad talent pool, they also worked on programs that built capacity internally. The AI apprenticeship initiative at Mastercard invited anyone in the business who was curious about the potential around AI to put up their hands for upskilling.
“As long as you’re hiring people with curiosity and agility, that for me is a more important skill than having the best LLM engineer,” said Rebecca.
AI skills aren’t just for new roles, though. They’re an important tool to make sure everyone across your global business is working as efficiently as possible. “When I started my career, I focused on getting promoted,” said Emi. “I was busy, I was tired, and I wasn’t working smart.”
Now, AI tools are helping her work with recruiters, hiring managers, and interviewers who are time poor but still need to produce the same output.
When it comes to finding tools to get them there, she sees how rapidly the tech is advancing. From early chatbots with clunky logic to AI that mimics human thinking (the Zinc team loves Juicebox), new advantages are opening up for teams constantly.
“But it also means that if you’re responsible for implementing, you need to upskill and find the time to do it,” said Emi. “That’s how organisations are going to be effective, not just busy.”
Navigating changing regulations and global requirements
To build a high performing team, sometimes you need to look outside of your own organisation. External factors like regulations make a huge difference on how effective you can be — something Kameka was familiar with.
Working at an FCA-regulated firm, she deals with the intersection between regulation and employment law, even when those two things clash.
As a result of the 2010 Equality Act updates, the FCA wanted to focus its own regulation on non-financial behaviours and DEI initiatives. So, Kameka’s team poured time, effort, and energy into realising what that looked like: performance matrices, building psychological safety, and stepping away from positive discrimination.
About three or four months ago, the FCA walked those updates back. But with firms responsible for meeting employment law requirements and industry regulations, Kameka’s seen a lot of companies fall on the wrong side of one or the other.
“It’s very important to have the right policies to maintain a high performing team and the skills they need to be successful,” said Kameka. “And you have to develop these skills while at the same time advocating for employee wellbeing.”
Looking further afield, Rebecca spoke about Mastercard’s growing presence in emerging markets like Egypt. After hiring widely, their US-based team didn’t have the market-specific knowledge to recruit quickly, build infrastructure, and tap into local expertise.
After talking to a local NGO, they realised that the employment regulations hadn’t actually been finished and there was no clear guidance on the final rules. Especially when it came to recruitment and employees with disabilities, labour laws simply hadn’t caught up to the present moment.
Rebecca’s biggest learning? “If you’re working in a big global organisation, you’re not going to know everything,” she said. “You have to lean on those wonderful colleagues or external legal counsel.”
Putting the time and effort into building relationships with local partners meant that they were in a position to keep their high performing team growing and make a broad positive change.
Protecting DEI on a global scale
At Elastic, Emi’s role is to recruit better, faster, easier, and more inclusively. With headquarters in the Netherlands and contracts all over the world, they have a strong focus on inclusion and belonging. Initially, Emi thought that the United States government’s switch on DEI wouldn’t affect how she did her job — until she realised that, with several US government contracts, they were sitting in a risky position.
They had two choices: keep their external language explicit about their commitment to diversity, or adjust. The first option meant that they could lose their government contracts, losing revenue and putting US jobs at risk. So they decided to change tactics. While they maintained a strong internal culture of inclusivity, they changed their external language to focus more on inclusion and belonging.
Moving beyond popular DEI strategies of the last decade, demonstrating an authentic commitment to inclusion, and building trust are all key topics that Kameka has explored in her career over the years as well.
“The workforce lags behind in representation, but some of the methods that organisations use have put DEI in a vulnerable spot,” she said. Instead of positive discrimination, her work focuses on casting the hiring net wider and looking for candidates where underrepresented groups are more likely to see the job posting.
Training underrepresented employees to become leaders, graduate programs, employee resource groups, and comprehensive benefits were all some of the ways she’s seen DEI initiatives help build high performing teams throughout her career.
“You need to change the narrative and message,” she added, “and bring people along the journey. Treat everyone fairly and give them all access to the same training and promotions.”
Of course, a global team means more room for cultural diversity — and clashes. With her mergers and acquisitions work for Mastercard, Rebecca’s biggest lesson is that talent needs to be embedded from the start of the due diligence process to ensure a successful integration and keep high-performing teams working at the same level.
“It’s not about the tech, platform, or software,” she said. “It’s about the people and how they integrate into the organisation. You could have the most exciting product, but if you’re not embedded in the right cultural way you’re never going to sell it as a big brand like Mastercard.”
When companies joining Mastercard haven’t been aligned on DEI, culture, or intentions, it can take years to integrate them, if they manage at all. But when she knows from the due diligence phase that a business is aligned ahead of time, it’s a matter of months. “You need folks that are agile and curious, and that has to happen both ways because that’s the only way you can get those integrations down,” said Rebecca.
“If both parties are curious, you’re on to a winner.”
Final thoughts: Prioritising performance in a changing global landscape
A conversation like this is only successful if it lands right with the audience. So we decided to test it in real time.
We asked our attendees what they thought their key focus to unlocking high performance should be. The answers?
Curiosity, adaptability, learning mindset, and critical thinking. Proving that no matter what, focusing on your people strategy and how you can keep growing in difficult situations remains the key for success.
Want to join us next time? Sign up for The Herd today and we’ll let you know when the next one’s happening. Plus, you’ll get a monthly digest of the most interesting news across HR, talent, and people operations.
