When Isabelle Adelt talks about gender diversity in the German economy, the word "role models" comes up time and again. "We need more women who simply go out there and encourage the next generation to be more daring," says the 39-year-old CFO of lubricant manufacturer Fuchs.

As one of the youngest female board members in the MDax, Adelt has been in such a role model position herself for just over a year. She took over the role in November 2022 from Dagmar Steinert, who in turn moved to the defence group Rheinmetall as CFO.

Adelt, born in 1984 in East Westphalia to an electrician and a construction draughtswoman, says she has always had a soft spot for numbers. After studying business administration and economics in Bielefeld, she started her career in management consultancy, where she was able to fully enjoy her love of travelling at the time. "My focus at EY was on M&A and restructuring, among other things, which took me virtually all over the world for four and a half years," says Adelt. "I was in India, the USA, Argentina, Europe and China. As I never travelled much as a child, I wanted to make the most of my opportunity. It was a great time."

In 2012, Adelt moved from consulting to the high-tech company Zeiss, where she again spent several years abroad. In 2019, she moved to Darmstadt-based measurement technology manufacturer Schenck Process, which had been sold to financial investor Blackstone two years earlier. "It's a very different way of doing business," recalls Adelt. "In such a private equity environment, people only count as long as they perform well. That wasn't what I wanted to do in the long term."

That's how she ended up at Fuchs, where "the best of both worlds came together", as she says. "As a family business, the Group offers a great culture. At the same time, being listed on the stock exchange ensures that we have to constantly develop further."

However, Adelt did not want to content herself with just the traditional areas of responsibility in the finance department, including controlling, compliance and investor relations. "I said that I also wanted to have a strategic impact," says the manager. So she was also given responsibility for implementing the Group's digital strategy.

And that sounds like a mammoth project. "Fuchs is completely decentralised, and with 56 companies, everyone did a bit of whatever they wanted to do," says Adelt. "As a first step, we set out to introduce coherent standards and processes and to establish data structures and a uniform organisational structure throughout the company. This is not really an IT project, but a genuine transformation."

Of course, such a project would also encounter resistance within the company. "Such a major reorganisation is, of course, a big change at first," explains Adelt. "It means that many cherished special approaches and procedures from the last 90 years have to be cut off. Nobody thinks that's great. But the added value is understood."

However, Fuchs is currently undergoing a fundamental change not only in the digital realm. The Group has also visibly rejuvenated itself in terms of personnel over the past year. Alongside Adelt, 44-year-old Sebastian Heiner has also joined the Management Board as Chief Technology Officer. He had already held the role of deputy and had previously worked for BASF in leading positions for many years. "We now have two new troublemakers who also bring in ideas and concepts from other companies," says Adelt.

In her view, different backgrounds on the Board of Directors are generally an important key to success. "I firmly believe that you can make better decisions with a high level of diversity overall, not just in terms of gender, but also in terms of age, educational background, nationality and at other levels," says Adelt. "This gives me a much broader picture of the topic I'm dealing with."

In the German economy, however, this is often still theory. Recent analyses have shown, for example, that the proportion of women on the boards of German stock market heavyweights hardly increases once legal requirements have been met. Gender parity is thus moving further into the distance.

"We still have a very long way to go," states Adelt, who is involved in the FeMale Leaders women's network alongside her CFO role. There, too, the word "role models" comes up again and again. "It's incredibly important that we tell young women: just have the courage, you can do it too. I think we can achieve a lot with that."