Constructed as Leaders

Discuss about the Leadership for Woolworths Food Group.

The current report is framed to assess the leadership approach adopted by key leaders in a work-related environment. The first section draws light on the background and construction of John Durkan, Brad Banducci and John Dixon as empowering leaders of Coles, Woolworths and David Jones respectively. Furthermore, in later parts of the report their approach to leadership and success trails are discussed in deep. 

Being a veteran of cutthroat British Grocery market, John had joined Coles as a Merchandise Director in 2008 July and then he was subsequently appointed as the COO (Chief Operating Officer) in June 2013. From 2005 to 2008 John had been playing the leading roles of COO and Trading Director at The Carphone Warehouse PLC, one of the UK’s largest independent mobile phone retailer. He had been positioned as the Managing Director of Coles in the year 2014. John had considerably enhanced customer wealth; product qualities and delivering expertise knowledge to Coles by working with Safeway Stores PLC in the UK for 17 years, a large-scale food retailer which operates all the convenience, supermarket and fuel outlets. The experience span of John is surpassing in areas like marketing, product development, leading high-performance teams, commercials etc.

Leadership, as well as the culture, can drive, make or break a brand and a team (Coles, Wang & Zhu 2015). Leadership at Retail needs to be done in the right manner to make a successful force and leaders are able to create the culture, which drives excellence and dire commitment to deliver spectacular results. John Durkan holds specialised skills to bring the competitive edge signalling towards the growing prospects of fresh price wars in the supermarket aisles. He has been strong about its aim to build Coles into a leading retailer at Wesfarmers.

Brad was positioned in Woolworth’s Food Group as the Managing Director in March 2015 and consecutively in February 2016, he became the Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer of the Group. Before acquiring the position he held the seat of Director of Group’s Liquor business between 2012 and March 2015. Brad had become a part of the group in 2011 after acquiring Cellarmasters Group, which was a direct wine retail and production company. He duly holds the position as the Chief Executive Officer of Cellarmasters from the year 2007 to 2011. Also, before this at Tyro Payments he had been the Chief Financial Officer as well as the Director plus the Non-executive Director. Later on, he was the Vice president as well as the Director with The Boston Consultancy Group, where he had been the core member of its retail practice for approx. 15 years. He had worked out to win over the confidence of investors again. It is working onto getting the top line sales and breaking the perceptions around the prices by yielding maximum market share for the business.

CEO of Coles Supermarket, John Durkan

The remarkable retail leaders are required to demand excellence through their own performances and by people who surround them. As an overarching strategy of Woolworth to remain Australia’s largest supermarket chain has led to the long battle, which needs to bring Woolworths to its glorifying days of dominant supermarket sectors (Bettis et al, 2016). With the increasingly fierce competitors, there has been a series of Public relations blunders and a plan to bring ad-hoc strategy. With Banducci appointed as CEO, it is important that it meets the target and become exclusively competitive again.

John Dixon who is a 30-year-old British retail veteran was attracted to Australia for revitalising David Jones.  He has been positioned as Chief Executive Officer of David Jones at Woolworths Holding Limited since 2016 January. He has also been an Executive director of General Merchandise at Marks and Spencer Group plc from 1^st October 2012 to July 2015. Meanwhile, in 2004 Mr Dixon filled in as an Executive Assistant to the Chief Executive of Stuart Rose. Since 2002, he was serving in as the Executive where he supervised one of the three Food exchanging divisions involving the Fresh food classifications (Kim & Buchanan, 2011). Mr Dixon joined UK Head Office in 1992 as a Food purchaser in the field of Prepared Foods, trailed by Bakery and Fresh Produce, before advancing to Category Manager of Fresh Produce. Mr Dixon filled in as an Executive Director at Marks and Spencer Group plc from 9^th September 2009 to 16^th July 2015.

Best retail leaders are intuitive yet acknowledge deliberate understanding of the highly worthy and productive team more than just a mere group of individuals (Liu, & Mauer, 2011). It is focused on the development of diversified colleagues and adequate range as well as complementing skills that rely on one another to get the job done. Also, they emphasize on creating a moment of delight for our customers. Remarkable leaders continually mark their presence by connecting the dots being aware of internal as well as external challenge and thus inspire and energize with innovative ideas. Mr Dixon is perceived to play a key role in the development of David Jones with novel ideas of food strategy that comprises of revitalising food halls, different wine bars and coffee shops and subsequently a chain of stand-alone food stores. It looks onto launching of new stand-alone stores that offer astonishing experiences to their customers.

CEO of Woolworths Limited, Bradford Banducci

Leadership is a process wherein a person influences others to achieve an objective and also direct organization in a manner that it becomes more coherent and cohesive.

It is the people at Coles that drive its competitive edge and put forth a clear preference onto promoting strong commercial capability through its leadership base. It is strongly advocated by leading analysts that Australian customers and competition have been “ripping off”. The company being at its peak does not wish to have a downward spiral (Amba, 2013). The company vows to cut down its cost, to further reduce the prices of products in the supermarket, underpinning a profitable growth as well as cutting down competition for next five years.

John Durkan has been holding a significant position in the Leadership team of Coles. He has outlined some of the major ambitious plans to transform Coles into Australia’s leading food and liquor chains. He has been committed to serving a customer-led business and moving continuously towards serving better value, service and quality products to their customer throughout Australia. He has continuously preached about the value of Coles Customers and the need to reduce prices even further to expand their brand range. This aims to build a trusted value position of Coles by lowering the cost and continually investing more in improvements to serve fresh food quality, adequate customer services and in-store availability (Krause Semadeni & Cannella, 2014). John Durkan seeks to continue the progress trail of Coles through its transformational programs focusing on simplifying the ranges, supply chains, as well as the store operations. He has also focused on enhancing sales momentum by an enhanced customer offer. Also, the business key attention is on building network growth. Thus, John’s aim is upon serving leading shop offers and instigating competitive drive to deal with the perspective changes.

He aspires to make a move to considerably turn Coles into world’s leading chain for this he has shown uncompromising stances with headstrong suppliers and his relentless focus on cost. During McLeod’s tenure, the actions and experiences of John Durkan showcase remarkable performance like underpinning profitable growth and enhanced returns at Wesfarmers by a rise in 30% of sales. Not only in Coles but Mr Durkan, who has worked for UK retailers Safeway and Carphone Warehouse, has highlighted a new growth phase therein by cutting down prices, enhancing Cole’s fresh food offerings, boosting their store services and adding financial aid to products such as life insurance.

CEO of David Jones, John Dixon

As per the leadership traits of John Durkan, it can be seen that he exhibits every character of a team leader grid that is strongly dedicated to not just assigning, but fulfilling tasks and building high relationships as well. John Durkan has set in positive examples and endeavours to encourage a team-oriented environment wherein each member can present its highest potential (Evans, Nagarajan & Schloetzer, 2010). He also acts as an individual team member and gathers cooperation as well as collaboration wherein he can reach the goals more aesthetically. Mr Durkan works tirelessly to reach his goals as effectively and as far as possible, which in return strengthens the bonds with their members. This has lead to some of the most productive teams under his leadership. To meet the current parlance of change, which requires beating the price war competition Mr Durkan follows situational leadership theory as developed by Hyslop (2012), which requires the appropriate mix of supervision and arousal required for coach workers in a specified situation. In order to cut down prices, the goal of Mr Durkan is to hit the sweet spot i.e., to serve the correct amount of supervision as per employee’s knowledge and skill level. The next aim is to arouse i.e., supportive nature which requires the task holders to arouse their inner drive to motivate them towards the change. Mr Durkan by setting up practical examples and sheer goals has resulted in arousing employee’s stimuli towards the cognitive tasks. Furthermore as advocated by Feigin (2016), Mr Durkan can meet its current phase of goals to enhance customer base and cut down the price considerably by adequate direction, coaching, by increased support and delegation of authorities as required.

Woolworths being highly competitive has been looking to survive against all the odds in the market. Being the chief executive of Woolworths, Brad Banducci leadership skills and advises have helped Woolworths to overturn its fortunes. Since Mr Banducci has taken charge at the Woolworths, the changes are already evident, as sales and earnings have started to improve (Keith, 2012). From past 4 consecutive years, the sales of Woolworths took a major hit and since then they haven’t improved much.

This is what made Mr Banducci change the focus of Woolworths from just concentrating on profits to improving customer service and satisfaction. His leadership skills are inspirational and motivation oriented, as he believes that satisfying customers, encouraging teamwork and innovation and admitting mistakes rather than denying them are some of the most important aspects that need to be improved. As proclaimed by Harms & Credé, (2010), leadership is an act of inspiring others to pursue one’s own vision within the pre-determined set parameters, through shared efforts, shared vision and shared success. He has conducted store induction programs to gain the utmost support of its new centre staff. His belief is that with great customer satisfaction comes money and profitability, if the customers are not happy then no matter how good your products are people will eventually stop buying them from your store.

Leaders Conceptualise leadership

Just like a transformational leader, Mr Banducci plan all its new head office and support centre staff members work in a store for their first week in order to understand and get familiar with what goes around in a store (Skinner & Pocock, 2011). The staffs are trained at Woolworths to meet the customer expectations. This was followed by installation of more cash registers and self-checkouts at the front end of all the stores, as this will help to serve customers faster and the queues will be less crowded.

Another step Mr Banducci has taken in order to focus on putting customers first is that more staff have been employed in stores for weekends so that shelves are restocked much quicker, as well as to replenish vegetables and fruits throughout the day. Also, there is a mobile application for store teams to notify them when the sub-standard fresh product arrives in the stores.

What makes Mr Banducci’s leadership skills unique is how he has invested close to 150 million US Dollars in grocery prices and services in addition to cutting down of prices on products such as bananas, sausages and mince to regain the market share that has been lost to companies like Coles and Aldi.

In order to assess how satisfied a customer is after visiting a Woolworths’ store, Brad Banducci introduced “shopper scorecard” last year, which measures how satisfied customers are with services such as prices, trolleys, check out queues and quality of fruit and vegetables. This step has been major in helping Woolworth realise how significantly their service and products have improved over the last year or so and the results have been astonishing.

Moreover, Mr Banducci has revealed that he would like to change the business model of Woolworths by selling assets in order to strengthen the food and liquor sales. All the crucial changes made by Mr Banducci combined has helped Woolworths to improve their sales, service and customer satisfaction, which in turn has also help Woolworths to improve their strategy.

Lastly, we all know that not everything comes with ease and so has been the case with Mr Banducci’s leadership strategy. The investors aren’t yet convinced and believe that the earnings will fall further, as share prices are still lower than compared to when they appointed Mr Banducci as the CEO of the company. Mr Banducci has assured them that progress is slower than what he expected, but he is confident that the sales and profits will gradually improve, as they have done since the last month (Arli, et al, 2013). His goal as a CEO has been to regain the spirit of innovation and continue to improve the focus on customers and he believes that he has been successful in doing so, thus the results will start to show in near future.

John Durkan approach to leadership

David Jones is a leading departmental store spread across Australia with a distinctive brand positioning. David Jones with the growing competition and advancement in technology faces key challenges towards enhanced development (Croft & Rose, 2012). The aim of the company is to meet these challenges by transforming the company, growing its store networks and strengthening their core business. In a crux, in order to survive it needs to bring and foster the change.

One of its key focuses has been to make online presence globally as an opportunity in order to constantly attract customers in the utmost experiential environment. As a part of the change management, David Jones in the senior most capacity had to build up a team for expanding companies digital strategy to upkeep the company positioning and status. In an interview, Dixon had proclaimed that David Jones would undergo a significant transformation, which would impede the need to establish a forward-looking leadership team. He furthermore, stated that the combination of new skills and experiences of key people, reflecting the prime areas of strategic focus would extend the companies capabilities during the enthusing phase of business development (Riaz & Haider, 2010).

Mr Dixon is perceived to also play a crucial role in the development of David Jones new gourmet food strategies that encompasses matters of the revitalization of food halls, new wine bars as well as coffee shops. They are keen onto innovating not just their products but also their in-store experiences to provide their customers with an outraging experience (Zhu et al, 2011). For this, it has specially created theatre, used colours, fresheners to inspire and excite customer to make it all the more a pleasurable experience. Dixon has very well proclaimed to its thoughts of moving away from its stores from stale old fashioned to a more enthusiastic experience. He believes that customers are more of rejecting old-fashioned shop mundane, as there are growing choices in the market for them. The company has exclusively undertaken a $100 million upgrade of the food business for rolling out its stores providing a fresh experience to customers.

It can be seemingly observed that John Dixon follows innovative leadership skills that is visionary and inspires other to think out of the box and seeks to create an environment where the creative ideas can be tested as well as evaluated (Spahr, P., 2015). It exhibits characteristics of a transactional leadership type wherein it reacts to change spontaneously to upkeep its level of performance. David Jones under the supervision of Mr Dixon is looking forward to the launching of new Food Halls and further smaller stores at the Central shopping centre and Bourke Street, Melbourne. He is also responsible for his technical role, along with all the research in addition to development, which will directly or indirectly impact the organization in a novel manner (Hor, 2012). This also emphasises onto encouraging an environment, which permits the employees to creatively solve the challenges and meet the change effectively (Feigin, 2016). This style of leadership often works in collaboration and Mr Dixon is seen eager to combine with its department store to capitalize its thoughts into being. He is also intuitive about entering a new field like that of taking advantage of strong growth in the e-commerce sector which fully integrated with online retailing operations. It is important that a correct direction is served, to which Mr Dixon justifies as he makes the experience seamless and easy for their customers as far as possible.

As situational leadership impels to work in ground-breaking conditions wherein leaders adapt themselves to the changing condition of the environment. The situational leadership in current era remains an undisputed leadership quality as this is not inherent personality but can be learned over the course of time. Mr Durkan has been featuring situational leadership qualities through its work wherein it analyses the situation and adopts an appropriate style to fit the changing circumstances and provides considerable direction to its team to meet the most out of current opportunities (Methner, Hamann & Nilsson, 2015). The primary advantage of this sort of leadership is it requires working out the relationships with our development people to build up the team that will rise to everyone’s benefit. Herein Mr Durkan exclusively promotes team orientation environment at Coles to best meet the complicated situation with efficiency.

On the other hand, Mr Banducci is inclined towards transformation leadership quality, which focuses on enhancing employee’s motivation and undertakes steps to link their identity with that of organizational values. Such leaders are often committed to their organizational goals and facilitate the participation of all in concluding a decision (McCleskey, 2014). The basic merit of such leadership is it they encourage and inspires its employees to leave back its comfort zones and meet the task at hand. Mr Banducci has been constantly focussing on extracting its employee’s full potential to continually develop and build a workforce that mirrors its customer base. He acknowledges the significance of engaging workforce at Woolworths, which is a leading indicator of customer satisfaction (Serfling, 2014).

On the contrary, Mr Dixon follows the transactional leadership approach to imbibe the changing the environment and deal out with the problems as and when they occur. Also, leaders following transactional role emphasize keenly on novel ideas and thereby transforms the organization culture. The transactional leaders set goals and explicitly provide guidelines as well as closely monitor the employees and group performance to reward the efforts according to their commitments (Beer, Jones & Clark, 2012). The prime motive of Mr Banducci was to effectively respond the deviations and recognize the corrective actions that are required to enhance the organizational performance. Currently, David Jones is embracing creative ideas by venturing into digital era of online shopping and making its stores more appealing to customers by meeting the changes that will help it in pursuing the shared vision.

While on one hand transformational leaders like Mr John Durkan serve new direction to the company and its employees to bring forth the change. On the other hand, Brand Banducci following situational leadership absorbs the market changes and applies their different leadership skills to motivate employees to fit themselves to changing environment. It inspires and motivates workers to transform their roles and perform in tune with the changed environment. Besides this the transactional leaders such as John Dixon are focused upon improving performance objectives by allowing self-interest of employees, which fosters flexibility, adaptability and real-time cost benefit to the organization. Although, transactional and transformation leader emphasise on relationship continuum nevertheless situational leader pays its entire focuses on task orientation.

Conclusion and Recommendation

It can be concluded that each of the CEO of Coles, Woolworths and David Jones are striving forth to capitalise the maximum potential value for its organization. They are all highly experienced yet have different approaches and goals to meet.

It is recommended that these three leaders need not exhibit just one set of the behaviour of leadership frame and inculcate another set of behaviours as well to move from one approach to another as and when required. To have a more passive leadership at Coles, Woolworths and David Jones, it is important that leaders entail their follower’s behaviour and develop their leadership abilities accordingly.

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