The long game: how Sophie Sanchez learnt that real change takes a decade, not a directive

Sophie Sanchez spent nearly 25 years inside large HR services groups, rising from CHO to Managing Director, before founding Leadhers four years ago. In that time, she led a gender equity transformation from the inside. Her argument: the EU pay transparency directive is arriving, and most companies have no idea how much work it actually requires.

TLDR

•  Sophie Sanchez spent nearly 25 years inside a large HR services group, rising from CHO to Managing Director, before leading another major HR group and founding Leadhers four years ago.

•  Building a gender equity programme that actually moved the numbers took her ten years of sustained work. She is watching companies try to do the same in one policy cycle.

•  Her operating principles: dare, stay genuinely curious about the business you are in, and never mistake a label for a transformation.

Ten years. That is how long it took Sophie Sanchez to build a gender equity programme that actually moved the numbers.

Not because the will was absent. Not because the data was unclear. Because changing the way an organisation distributes money, opportunity, and credibility requires budgets that do not always materialise, managers who need time to understand before they can act, and a culture that moves at its own pace regardless of what the strategy deck says.

“You do not always have the budget every year to reduce the gaps,” she says. “There is an economic context. There is a time for teams to understand. It does not happen like that.”

She is saying this now because the EU pay transparency directive is arriving, and she watches companies and HR directors scrambling, visibly unprepared, for something she spent a decade learning to do properly. “I do not know if they realise how much work it requires.”

The directive is not a shortcut

The part of the directive everyone is talking about, publishing salary bands on job postings, is, in Sophie’s view, the easy part. The real work sits underneath it.

The European directive, adopted in May 2023 with a transposition deadline of 7 June 2026, goes well beyond salary disclosure on job adverts. It requires organisations to report pay gaps, justify unexplained differentials above 5%, and shift the burden of proof in discrimination cases onto the employer. France will not meet the deadline. Studies published in early 2026 suggest more than half of French companies are not ready, and three quarters have not yet begun preparing.

Sophie is not surprised. Genuine pay transparency forces an honesty into organisations that, handled well, becomes structural. It surfaces the distance between what leadership says it values and what the numbers actually show. Done seriously, she argues, it becomes a foundation for something more important than compliance.

“Transparency is a milestone of trust. And trust is the engine of everything.”

She has seen what happens when trust is absent: strategy that never reaches the ground, teams that disengage without anyone quite knowing why, and the slow accumulation of distance between what an organisation intends and what it delivers. Closing that distance is now the work she does with executives and leadership teams at Leadhers. The pay equity chapter of her career made her unusually good at it.

An unconventional path

Sophie did not plan a career in leadership. She says this without false modesty: it simply was not the plan. Her trajectory moved upward through sustained curiosity and an unusual refusal to stay inside the boundaries of her function.

She spent nearly 25 years inside a large HR services group, rising from CHO to Managing Director, before going on to lead another major HR group. When she was heading HR, she was not only an HR expert. She was watching commercial performance, following what was happening on the ground with teams, and paying close attention to the gap between what the boardroom decided and what actually reached the front line. That gap, she says, is where most organisations silently fail.

“There is often a lot of distance. On the ground, things lack meaning, expectations diverge, and it does not work.”

That cross-functional instinct eventually carried her from HR leadership into general management. It was not a common trajectory. Some questioned her legitimacy as Managing Director because she had come from HR rather than from sales or operations. She does not dwell on it. But she notes it, because it is exactly the kind of structural assumption that keeps capable people from being seriously considered for roles they are more than ready to do.

On quotas: a change of mind

When gender quota legislation first arrived, Sophie was against it.

She says so directly, without performing a conversion she does not feel. The discomfort was genuine. When you have spent years proving yourself in rooms where you were the only woman, the idea that your presence might be attributed to a quota rather than your competence lands as an insult. There is, she says, always a kind of sword of Damocles: the pressure to prove what you are capable of, regardless of what you have already demonstrated.

And yet she changed her mind. She looked at the evidence. She looked at the board announcements, the leadership photos, the operational committees. She counted the women. The number was still too low, and without external pressure it moved too slowly.

“Quotas have moved the subject forward. I am now on the side of quotas. But it is long.”

What changed her position was not ideology. It was arithmetic and patience, or rather the recognition that patience without structural pressure produces very little. Companies are not holding back talent because they are hostile to women. They are holding it back because they keep recruiting in the image of what they already have. The directive will not fix that overnight. But it will make the cost of inaction visible.

What Leadhers actually does

Leadhers is not a gender equity consultancy. Sophie is deliberate about that distinction.

Her work today is about the gap between strategic intent and operational reality: helping executive teams close the distance between what an organisation says it wants to be and what its people actually experience day to day. She works with founders, executives, and teams in transition. She spent years at the intersection of digital transformation and HR inside large groups, and that dual fluency shapes how she reads organisations.

She is, by her own description, a one-woman operation. She does not run a community or a movement, even if others might see it that way. Her practice builds through encounter and relationship rather than content strategy or brand building.

In 2026, that is almost a provocation.

The advice she gives

Dare. That is the word she returns to when asked what she would tell women navigating their way to senior leadership.

Not in a motivational poster sense. In the specific, practical sense that women at senior levels tend to self-limit because there are too few models. No proof that the path exists. No one who looks like them at the level they are aiming for.

“If there is no model, do not ask too many questions. Go.”

She also says: do not be afraid to fail. Not because failure is painless, but because the people who have built something real have almost always built it partly from what did not work. The condition, she adds, is the capacity to step back and analyse what happened, not just survive it.

The less expected piece of advice is this: stay genuinely interested in the business you are in. Not as a performance of competence, but as real curiosity. She went back to study while working. When she was in HR, she stayed close to commercial realities. She crossed into general management not because she planned a move, but because she had never stopped paying attention to the whole.

“You have to dare. But you also have to be interested. Really interested.”

The long view

Asked where she sees herself in five years, Sophie does not have an answer prepared. She means it. She has learnt to let the path build itself through the people she meets and the problems she finds genuinely worth solving.

What she does know is that the two questions she has spent her career on are not resolved. The place of women in professional life. The distance between what organisations intend and what they deliver. The directive will create pressure. Pressure will create discomfort. Discomfort, handled properly, creates transparency. And transparency, she believes, is where trust begins.

Ten years to build a programme that actually moved the numbers. She would do it again.

“Trust is the engine of everything. Once it is established, whatever difficult situations you face, it is easier to move forward.”

Sophie Sanchez is Fondatrice et CEO of Leadhers. She was interviewed by Francine Nyamba, Chief of Staff at Talent Business Partners. Leadhers is listed on Talent Business Partners, the reference platform where specialist consultants prove their expertise with verified results.