Set yourself a target, Coles chief Leah Weckert tells women who want to lead

Coles boss Leah Weckert has told the annual CEW summit that women should seek sponsors rather than mentors if they wish to get to the top of the corporate ladder.

Coles chief executive Leah Weckert. Picture: Nicki Connolly

Coles boss Leah Weckert has some hard personal and corporate rules to help fix Australia’s dramatic gender imbalance, with the latest Chief Executive Women census showing that 91 per cent of ASX 300 companies are still led by men.

The 44-year-old is just three months into her journey as the first female leader of Australia’s biggest supermarket chain, and says her path to the top was driven by singular purpose.

“First of all, I’ve been pretty clear about my plan,” Ms Weckert told the audience at the CEW ­annual summit in Melbourne. “I’ve really been telling people since I was about 20 that I wanted to be a CEO. I set a target and then shoot for it.

“And I’ve navigated my entire career trying to find as many experiences as I can to put in my toolkit that would serve me well when it came to this moment.”

Those experiences have been diverse.

Adelaide-raised Ms Weckert is an accomplished flautist and studied chemical engineering at university, somehow also finding the time while studying to set up a non-profit called Beyond Participation, to try to get more young people, including women, into science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

After university, she ended up at McKinsey & Co as a consultant before jumping ship to join Coles as the chief executive, commercial and express, and rising to the role of chief financial officer.

Ms Weckert believes women should seek sponsors if they want to end up running the show. Sponsors, as opposed to mentors, who can get them the kinds of ­diverse roles needed to be successful at the pointy end.

“I’ve had three amazing sponsors … who saw potential that they were willing to take a risk on, to enable me to get a breadth of experiences and also to work with me to help me set myself up when I went into those experiences, to manage the risk.” Hence the fact that the chemical engineer was CFO of the Year in 2019.

“That’s clearly a ‘fake it till you make it’ moment,” she laughs. “But I think back to that, and all the help I was given by some really key people to put the right ­infrastructure around me.”

The mother of two believes it is important for people angling to be boss one day to have experience across brand, balance sheet, capital markets and in leading large teams.

“Those are the types of things you actually need, so that when you come into the CEO role, you can have a degree of confidence of stepping into it and feeling good about it from day one,” Ms Weckert said.

As a supermarket chain with many lower-paid roles, Coles’ overall female participation in the workforce has always been strong, currently sitting at just over 50 per cent.

But in leadership roles, the numbers told a different story. As recently as 2017, there were “well below” 20 per cent of women in leadership positions.

To rebalance this problem, Ms Weckert says the company had to reassess which roles were conduits to promotion and whether that was contributing to more men getting ahead than women.

“One of the big insights was that our pipeline didn’t really work because a lot of our female leaders were in roles like a department manager for a bakery or deli,” she said.

“None of those roles were feeders to become store managers and regional managers. So we had to go and completely rewrite our paradigm in terms of what types of roles got promoted.”

Now, the company has women in 40 per cent of its leadership roles.

The mantra of targets is shared by global mining giant BHP, which historically had a male-dominated workforce.

BHP chief executive Mike Henry says the firm has gone from 17 per cent female participation in 2016 to 35 per cent ­female participation now. Importantly, he adds that women account for 40 per cent of leadership roles and his direct team is just over 50 per cent women.

Mr Henry puts this down to a clear commitment by BHP, introduced before he was CEO, to reaching its gender targets.

“I remember in about 2017 showing up to my annual planning session with the CEO at the time and it was all looking really challenging and I think our plan was achieving 1 per cent below (target gender) balance by 2025,” he recalled.

“I got sent out of the room and told to come back with a plan that achieved the objectives. So it was that level of fierce commitment to the goal and holding leaders to account, that unlocked the level of creativity, commitment, effort, resourcing that otherwise wouldn’t have been there. That’s what’s helped us move the dial so, so quickly.”

While Coles and BHP have signed up to gender targets, the CEW is calling for more companies to set themselves goals.

The latest CEW census shows that eight in 10 CEO pipeline roles are held by men, which could lead to ongoing delays in achieving gender parity.

Ms Weckert agrees that more companies needed to come on board. Set targets and if you need to, get creative about sorting it out, she says.

“What gets measured gets done,” she adds. “Encourage yourself and every person on your leadership team to be sponsoring one amazing woman – ­because it is one-by-one that we will change this.

“We have an awful lot of leaders in Australia, and if every one of them is working hard to get one woman promoted in the next year, that changes it pretty quickly,” she said.

But she advises against just hoping a company will do the right thing by you. For individuals, she says, set your own goals and get that sponsor.

“They stretch you. They know when you can do more than you know yourself, and they are there at that moment to step in and say ‘You’re not going to talk yourself out of this’, they make you go for it,” said the Coles boss, who then dashes off to address some of her 120,000 employees.