Finance Monthly CFO Awards Winners Edition

Finance Monthly CFO Awards 2020 www.finance-monthly.com 19 UNITED KINGDOM Finance Monthly CFO Awards 2020 If I had to give only one piece of advice, however, it would be to find a good mentor. In today’s environment, CFOs tend to go beyond the spreadsheets and are a partner in the business. How do youmanage your responsibilities effectively? Company Directors are faced with an ever-increasing amount of data from multiple sources. It is the role of the CFO to cut through the noise and present relevant and timely information to enable top management to make the best decisions. Only by becoming the organisations’ data champion will CFOs gain the trust of management as the single source of truth. The key to achieving this is to have a world-class team behind you. This includes having Finance and Business Intelligence teams that are technologically savvy and can support their finance business partners who are fully immersed in the business’ daily operations. It’s important to remember that success doesn’t start with the CFO, it starts with getting the right team working together. I’m incredibly fortunate to say I have a brilliant team made up of almost 300 strong individuals integrated across the business, without whom I could not do my job. What’s leadership to you? At Lidl, we are one team with one vision, and we understand that our success is down to every single one of our 25,000 colleagues. From our store colleagues to our Board of Directors, we are all working in the same direction and it is inspiring to be a part of this. I have had the privilege to lead people in different parts of the world, in both corporate and military environments, locally and across the globe. I believe that leadership can’t be universal and should be flexible, targeted and individualised to be effective. It should not be about position or title, but rather action and example. As a leader, you are measured on the strength of your team and their development. It is vital that a leader displays a clear and concise vision whilst upholding integrity, and genuinely being interested in developing each individual member of the team. Leadership is about communicating - well and a lot. So, what can we expect to see next from Lidl? Since joining Lidl GB in 2014, the business has not stopped growing. This pace of growth shows no signs of slowing and the scale of our ambition has only increased. We are continuing to open a new store almost every week and recently committed to an expansion investment of £1.3bn across 2021 and 2022. Despite times of economic uncertainty, we are continuing to push forward to help ensure that as many communities as possible have access to a Lidl store, whilst continuing to create more jobs along the way. In addition to opening new stores and warehouses, we are also due to move into our brand new Head Office next year, located near Kingston. We’ve outgrown our existing office and currently occupy multiple spaces around Wimbledon, so the move will help to bring all our Head Office teams together, enabling us to work as effectively as possible to support the rest of the business. We have several innovation projects on the go which are of course still confidential, but that are constantly driving the business forward. We continue to encourage ideas and innovation from right across the company, with reward mechanisms in place for new projects that end up being implemented through our Idea Management Programme. Anyone wanting to join our team should keep a close eye on our careers site for new opportunities. Q Q Q