The Warehouse Group is overhauling its C-suite to support more agile ways of working.
The company, which operates The Warehouse, Warehouse Stationery, Noel Leeming, Torpedo7 and TheMarket, announced the leadership shakeup on Monday, just a few days after it announced the departure of COO Mark Yeoman.
The move will see the group do away with CEOs for some of its retail chains and instead form a “leadership squad” to set the strategy and empower the individual businesses to deliver.
The current CEOs of The Warehouse and Warehouse Stationery, Pejman Okhovat, and Noel Leeming, Tim Edwards, will transition to COO and chief sales officer, respectively.
Other brands remain unchanged, with Simon West remaining CEO of Torpedo7, which will adopt many agile principles, and Justus Wilde remaining CEO of TheMarket, which already employs agile ways of working.
The full leadership squad is listed below.
“As part of an agile way of working, The Warehouse Group head office will move from a more traditional hierarchical structure to one that involves co-located self-managing teams empowered to deliver for rapidly evolving customer needs,” Nick Grayston, The Warehouse Group’s CEO, explained in a statement.
“Each team will have clear accountabilities and will collaborate quickly and effectively to deliver to customer expectations and business priorities.”
The Warehouse Group will reportedly adopt agile ways of working from August 2020, with the idea that this will enable it to keep customers at the centre of everything it does, execute quickly, innovate and become a best place to work.
“The future will be dominated by an ever-increasing pace of change and traditional structures are too slow to provide a flexible platform to react at pace to changing customer dynamics,” Grayston said.
The Warehouse Group reported $3.1 billion in FY19, up 2.6 per cent on FY18.
The new leadership squad will consist of the following:
- Group CEO: Nick Grayston – no change
- Chief financial officer: Jonathan Oram – no change
- Chief transformation officer: Scott Newton – no change
- Chief digital officer: Michelle Anderson – no change
- Chief information officer: Edwin Gear – no change
- Chief customer officer: Jonathan Waecker – currently chief marketing officer
- Chief sales officer: Tim Edwards – currently CEO Noel Leeming
- Chief operating officer: Pejman Okhovat – currently CEO The Warehouse/Warehouse Stationery
- Chief Product Officer: Tania Benyon – currently CEO group sourcing support and TWL/WSL merchandise
- Chief human resources officer: Richard Parker (Acting) – currently Acting chief people officer
