Find out how Siemens' Global Head of Talent and Organization is redefining leadership through joyous performance, situational leadership, and human-centric AI.
Emma Coppin
Multimedia Content Lead, Thought Leadership and Customer Stories
Workday
Forget the myth that high performance requires high stress. Nanda Burke is proving her personal philosophy of leading a culture of “joyous performance” is the secret sauce for high-performing teams at Siemens.
As the global head of talent and organization at the 178-year-old company, she plays a key role in shaping how more than 300,000 people work and collaborate in a digital world, where high performance and a sense of belonging go hand in hand.
When Burke talks about leadership, she doesn't start with strategy decks or performance metrics. She talks about lightness. At one point, she even uses a simple bus analogy to make a bigger point: no one person carries the weight of the entire organization. That awareness enables and empowers her team to take responsibility, experiment, and focus on performance without fear.
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The Philosophy of Joyous Performance and Situational Leadership
Burke’s “joyous performance” philosophy subverts the traditional industrial legacy by reframing joy—not as a soft perk, but as a serious competitive advantage. “It’s a state of infectious joy combined with a certain lightness,” says Burke. “It leads to a lot of laughter, but also a lot of pace and a lot of really high performance.”
But how do you maintain that "lightness" while moving at a global pace? For Burke, the answer is situational leadership. She rejects rigid management formulas, advocating instead for a style that adapts to the specific needs and context of both the individual and the task.
She believes that when a leader creates psychological safety, it unlocks creativity that pressure never could. Burke describes her role as a shield, standing in front of her team during challenges and behind them during wins.
This is where psychological safety becomes tactical. Safety doesn't mean a lack of direction; it means knowing your leader has the right "gear" for the situation. By switching between coaching, directing, and delegating, Burke ensures that her team feels supported rather than micromanaged or abandoned.
Burke’s experience in global organizations such as Unilever and Shell has shaped her approach to situational leadership—reflected in her view that “every person is an individual” and in her admission that she is “consistent in her inconsistency”. This people‑centric lens aligns with Siemens’ broader shift toward a customer‑back way of thinking, which emphasizes understanding context and behavior rather than applying one‑size‑fits‑all models.
It leads to a lot of laughter, but also a lot of pace and a lot of really high performance.
When the conversation turns to artificial intelligence, Burke avoids the usual tech jargon. Instead, she uses a powerful analogy: just as factories once replaced steam engines with electric motors without rethinking their processes, many companies are still using AI to do what they’ve always done. To help people across Siemens explore new ways of working with AI, the company has introduced initiatives such as SiemensGPT, the gamified “AI Basecamp”, and a growing ecosystem of more than 15,000 people-built agents – all designed to make AI accessible at scale.
Burke repeatedly emphasizes that, despite the scale of technological change, the human element remains essential. She points out that AI should augment people rather than replace them and warns of broader risks such as polarization and the erosion of critical thinking.
Her vision for Siemens is a company that is as joyous as it is high-performing. She wants a workplace where technology has purpose, but people have power. “Our job is to ensure we never lose sight of the people who make everything possible,” Burke says.
Our job is to ensure we never lose sight of the people who make everything possible.
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In the past decade HR has undergone a major evoluton from a supportive role to a strategic one. However, as this report finds, HR teams are more conservative on AI than finance and IT. That makes the potential competitive advantage even greater—learn more below.