This was going to be the year everything got back to normal. Since Leah Weckert (MBA 2008) became the CFO at Australia’s Coles Group in 2018, the supermarket giant had announced a demerger—the largest in the country’s history—from corporate parent Wesfarmers, established itself as an independent company on the Australian stock exchange, and diversified its leadership team, which had been primarily male before she joined. “For a couple of years, it felt like we were building everything from scratch,” says Weckert, who has worked at Coles in a variety of roles, from merchandise buying to operations management, for nearly nine years. She finally felt like the biggest challenges were behind the company. The year 2020 was going to be stable, she recalls thinking.

But by late 2019, it was clear that would not be the case, as the country was buffeted first by an unprecedented bushfire season that burned 46 million acres and then by the coronavirus pandemic. As Weckert spoke from her home in Melbourne in October 2020, the city remained under strict lockdown. “Both of these things have had an enormous impact for our businesses, but also for the communities we live in,” she observes.

For the $17 billion retailer, the dual crises were a reminder that the services the company provides are necessary ones. There were very human moments of fear and panic—when store managers in fire-ravaged New South Wales sent photos of flames approaching their stores, or when the company’s 120,000 employees came to work concerned that best-available safety protocols would not be enough to protect them from a little-understood novel coronavirus. “But now it has evolved into a real moment of pride for us,” Weckert reflects. “We are an essential service and that has changed the way that customers interact with our team and how our team members view themselves. Celebrating that has become an important part of our year.”

The events of 2020 meant putting aside financial concerns temporarily and focusing on community needs. During the fires, that meant shuttling food and workers to affected areas to restock shelves and give taxed local staff needed time off. In the early days of the pandemic, it meant doing whatever could be done to stock toilet paper. Weckert estimates that in one week, the company sold three rolls for every Australian man, woman, and child. Ultimately, caring for the community was a profitable strategy: The company saw a 7.1 percent year-over-year increase in retail profits for the fiscal year that ended in June.

Weckert isn’t going to predict that the coming year will bring the stability she had been waiting for, but she does expect some of the shifts in consumer behavior brought on by the pandemic to persist. Coles has seen a significant uptick in online ordering—Weckert estimates the company saw five years’ worth of adoption in six months—and people are consuming more at home, which means more demand for whole ingredients, instead of convenience foods, and, of course, for toilet paper.

As for Weckert, she’s back to building things from scratch. This time, it’s cupcakes with her daughter.

How to: Diversify your leadership team

Believe.
“You have to have a resolute belief that there are qualified people out there who are going to be brilliant at doing the job and also have the diversity characteristics you’re looking for,” Weckert says. “Sometimes it takes a long time to find those people and you have to work really hard at it. But if you have that belief, it is possible.”

Sponsor future leaders.
“You need to get the right people in at the more junior levels and put great structures around them for sponsorship,” she observes. Sponsorship is more than mentorship for Weckert. “A sponsor is someone who helps you unlock opportunities, who is proactively helping you to manage your career.”

Normalize your normal.
“When I came on the executive leadership committee, it was not normal for someone to say ‘Can we start the meeting at nine o’clock, because I want to drop the kids at school?’ I have worked to normalize that and to build a culture where people are transparent and authentic about their choices.”

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