After 26 years with the Danone Group, where Flo­rence Con­stant was one of the first women in France to be appoint­ed as Direc­tor for a fac­to­ry pro­duc­tion site, she moved on to join the McCormick Group in 2016, again to direct a pro­duc­tion plant at Car­pen­tras. Thurs­day Octo­ber 4, 2018, she par­tic­i­pat­ed in a spe­cial “Boost your CV” Day orga­nized by Trem­plin UTC (the UTC alum­ni asso­ci­a­tion. Below is a por­trait of this woman – dec­o­rat­ed in 2013 with the insignia of cheva­lier in the Ordre nation­al de la Légion d’honneur — who sees human and col­lec­tive needs and inter­ests lying at the heart of her preoccupations. 

Maybe it was the harsh nature she grew up with in Auvergne, that gave Flo­rence a taste for accept­ing hard work, a cer­tain form of real­ism and also the capac­i­ty “to think out­side the box”. Put dif­fer­ent­ly, Flo­rence Con­stant does not hes­i­tate at all to think beyond the com­mon, con­sen­su­al frame­work. She will always ques­tion ortho­dox hearsay and wide­spread opin­ions. As she her­self puts it, the worst brakes to ini­tia­tive are those we build our­selves and she encour­ages young peo­ple, par­tic­u­lar young women, to avoid “any and all forms of self-cen­sure when it comes to pro­fes­sion­al choic­es and deci­sions”. After all, was she not in 2014 one of the first women to be appoint­ed as an indus­tri­al Plant Man­ag­er in France. She showed a wide sense of open­ness with respect to her col­leagues and staff and as she says, he has the feel­ing that “noth­ing can go right until we have a tight­ly bound team!”

And this incli­na­tion for hard work, where did it come from? Part­ly through prac­tic­ing and play­ing high-lev­el bas­ket­ball, in Bourges where her par­ent teach­ers has been appoint­ed… well, until some painful back trou­ble forced her to stop the basketball 

Her sense of real­i­ties? Ini­tial­ly she want­ed to become a « vet » — she spent a lot of her free time trav­el­ling round the Cher coun­try­side with a pro­fes­sion­al vet­eri­nary doc­tor, but final­ly, hav­ing giv­en thought to her own future, she opt­ed to do a “classe pré­para­toire” at the Lycée du arc, Lyon. This choice was due to her inter­est in agro-food busi­ness­es and her deep con­vic­tion of the noble aspi­ra­tions of a sec­tor the final­i­ty of which is to feed the plan­et, with all its “var­ied and inter­est­ing pro­fes­sions”. Suc­ceed­ing in a num­ber of com­pet­i­tive admis­sion exams, she yet again demon­strat­ed her capac­i­ty to think dif­fer­ent­ly and chose to inte­grate UTC via the analy­sis of her scholas­tic dossier rather than go to a clas­sic engi­neer­ing school (grand école) which she deemed of medi­um inter­est. “What I liked in the UTC pro­to­col where my exam­in­er not only took my school marks in account but also assessed my past in bas­ket­ball and music”. It was an open­ing that enriched me, by ricochet. 

It was dur­ing her first pro­fes­sion­al expe­ri­ence that she acquired a sense for serv­ing oth­ers and col­lec­tive sys­tems. Her appoint­ment was as QA engi­neer (qual­i­ty assess­ment) in a Danone fac­to­ry unit in Charleville-Méz­ières in the Ardennes (East France), Flo­rence Con­stant encoun­tered the arche­typ­al boss “author­i­tar­i­an, misog­y­nous … old-fash­ioned man­age­ment in short”. She decid­ed to adopt exact­ly the oppo­site style and for­mat and ever since she demon­strat­ed, in every posi­tion she held with the Danone group up till 2016, that cre­ativ­i­ty, inno­va­tion and tem per­for­mance only are made pos­si­ble if “we work togeth­er with syn­er­gy and com­ple­men­tar­i­ty rather than endure rival­ry and authoritarianism”. 

The pres­ti­gious dec­o­ra­tion of Cheva­lier in the Nation­al Order of the French Légion d’honneur, crowns not only an out­stand­ing pro­fes­sion­al career but her dis­play of human qual­i­ties that every­one who knows her read­i­ly acknowl­edges. The insignia were for­mal­ly grant­ed dur­ing the 2013 Agri­cul­tur­al Fair in Paris, by Min­is­ter Muriel Péni­caud (Man­pow­er Resources and Employ­ment), for­mer Direc­tor of Man­pow­er Resources for the Danone Group. 

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Bio notes

1989: grad­u­ate engi­neer UTC major­ing in bio-engi­neer­ing (UTC-GB)

1990: appoint­ed QA (qual­i­ty assess­ment) engi­neer in a Danone fac­to­ry in Charleville-Méz­ières (West France) 

2013: appoint­ed Plant Man­ag­er with the Danone group and dec­o­rat­ed with the insignia of cheva­lier dans l’Ordre nation­al de la Légion d’honneur

2016: Plant Man­ag­er, Pro­duc­tion plant in the McCormick Group at Car­pen­tras (South France)