‘Dame Sharon White deserves our respect and admiration’

For many, it’s easy to write off such comments as just another piece of the media narrative.

But when you’ve been on the business end of retail transformation for over 25 years, as I have, you truly understand the weight these small words carry. You can be resilient to a point, sure. But behind closed doors, you take it personally. Because no retailer ever wants to fail their people. It weighs very heavily on your mind.

Unprecedented times

Imagine, for a moment, stepping into the leadership role of a major department store chain, not in its heyday, but during a global pandemic.

The department store model was already undergoing significant change. But then a sector already grappling with myriad challenges found itself shutting its doors not once, but twice. It was a period of huge uncertainty, fear and rapid adaptation.

We’ve also got to think about more recent times and the perma-crisis of challenges that every retailer has been faced with. For all retailers, it’s perhaps the toughest time in a generation. Certainly in my career.

Dame Sharon didn’t just take a job. She took on an enormous oil tanker of a challenge, one that many would have shied away from. It’s this resilience, this courage to lead in the face of adversity, which deserves our respect and admiration.

Not just a business

I’ve been there. From the ground up in retail, climbing the corporate ladder through nearly every role, to serving as the transformation director at Debenhams during its 2017/18 turnaround programme.

The days were long, hard and the plan changed very frequently, there was a lot that you couldn’t control.

But at the heart of each decision? People. It was all about people, and how quickly could we fix or adapt things to save peoples’ jobs. Working as a collaborative team under a corporate governance model. With a collective responsibility to do the right thing. You are always aware of the impact on people at every level, every day.

“The age of retail critics needs to give way to genuine collaboration and learning”

Because of that, the often unseen side of executive leadership is the weight of responsibility that comes with it. A department store isn’t a nimble startup. It’s an absolute behemoth, bound by long leases, legacy systems and operations, and large, sometimes perplexing, org charts. Making significant changes is never a matter of months but years.

But the media, in particular the social media narrative, is often far removed from this reality. The recent slew of critiques from armchair retail warriors is a testament to this. It’s so easy to comment from a distance, to point out what could’ve been done better. But making decisions, especially in a sector as dynamic as retail, and as complex as a department store, is never straightforward. More so under a partnership model and even more so when some of the team had bailed out early.

A call for unity

As we all envision a brighter future for UK retail, maybe it’s time that we re-evaluate our approach. The age of retail critics needs to give way to genuine collaboration and learning. Our focus shouldn’t be on tearing each other down but on building a cohesive and supportive retail community.

UK retail has the potential to be extraordinary. But to realise this potential we need to foster a sense of togetherness, understanding and, most importantly, kindness.

So while many critics think it may not have gone to plan for Dame Sharon White, it remains that we haven’t really seen the plan and the plan will change, again and again, because that’s how retail works.

There is a way to go until she steps down and I wish her and her team every success in forming the next part of the strategy. We all want John Lewis and its partners to navigate successfully through its transformation.

Maybe we could all help a little by just being a bit kinder.

Matt Parry is chief executive of The Future Collective