How Coles and Unilever are ripping up traditional leadership playbooks and betting on courageous, data-driven leaders to navigate chaos, drive performance and build truly inclusive workplaces
In a climate of economic uncertainty, employee unrest and rapid transformation, two of Australia’s biggest employers say the next era of leadership will be defined less by frameworks on paper and more by the courage and clarity leaders show in the everyday moments that matter.
Speaking on a panel moderated by SheMentors founder Ali Adey, Coles’ head of people and culture – supermarket operations, Liam Mahon and Unilever’s chief HR officer ANZ and APAC, Shruti Ganeriwala, unpacked how their organisations are rethinking leadership competency frameworks, culture and the pipeline of future leaders.
From “kind leadership” to sharper accountability
Mahon, who heads up P&C supermarket team members across Australia, said Coles is in the midst of evolving its leadership expectations after several years of focusing on execution excellence. crisis-mode management.
He pointed to the pressures of cost-of-living, customer grievances and a barrage of Fair Work Commission claims as a backdrop that has fundamentally changed what is required of leaders.
“We’ve built a leadership approach that’s been very supportive and accommodating,” Mahon said. “But now we need to add more edge. We need leaders who bring stronger accountability and drive. To get there, we have to be clear on what that looks like and actively build those capabilities.”
Rather than introducing another standalone framework, Coles is focusing on strengthening leadership through its existing values: care, customer, create and courage. While each value is supported by defined behaviours, Mahon acknowledged these haven’t yet been translated into clear, practical expectations that leaders can apply day to day.
“At the moment, the framework largely sits in the background. It’s used within HR, but it’s not well understood across the organisation,” he said. “Our focus now is evolving it into something more practical – something people can easily understand and use, and that helps build real leadership capability.”
He added that one of the biggest challenges is making the framework scalable across very different roles, from frontline store managers to corporate general managers.
“There needs to be a consistent core – a baseline expectation for what it means to be a leader,” he said. “But how that shows up will vary depending on the context, whether that’s in-store or at an enterprise level.”
Unilever: making “performance is care” the new norm
Ganeriwala described a similar journey at Unilever, where the global giant has consolidated its leadership expectations into four core behaviours: “care deeply”, “focus on what counts”, “stay three steps ahead” and “deliver with excellence”.
She said the company is deliberately challenging the idea that performance and care sit at opposite ends of a spectrum.
“We’ve been very good at care and taking care of our people, and we want to maintain that,” she said. “But the thing we really want to dial up is the performance side. Performance and care are not two different things… performance is care.”
That philosophy underpins Unilever’s global partnership with researcher and author Brené Brown on “courageous leadership”. Executives around the world – including Unilever’s top leadership team – are going through a tailored Dare to Lead program, with investment cascading through local leadership populations.
Ganeriwala stressed that courage is being treated as a buildable skillset rather than a personality trait.
“I really like the way Brené Brown talks about this – courage is a set of skills that can be built,” she said. “Hence we, as organisations and HR people, have a huge role to play in helping our leaders build that skill.”
For Unilever, that means a sustained focus on:
- Equipping leaders to show vulnerability and talk openly about challenge and uncertainty
- Teaching people at all levels to give and receive feedback, anchored in the idea that “clear is kind”
- Building trust “in micro moments” through everyday actions and language
- Creating a single, shared leadership language across all markets and levels
Historically, she noted, organisations have stopped at training line managers how to deliver feedback. Unilever is now also investing in employees’ skills to seek, receive and give feedback, so accountability and honesty become shared responsibilities.
“You can’t stop at line managers,” she said. “You need to equip employees at the same time.”
Using data – and being brave enough to ‘de-average’ it
Both leaders agreed that data is critical in making leadership conversations real – but only if organisations are willing to get uncomfortable.
At Coles, Mahon said engagement survey insights highlighted a gap in how courage is experienced across the organisation.
“It was a sobering set of insights,” he said. “It helped reinforce that there’s more to do to ensure our people feel supported to speak up and act with confidence, and that we need to take action to address that.”
Ganeriwala warned against being lulled into complacency by strong averages.
“Overall, it looks good, it shows positive movement,” she said of Unilever’s internal data. “But actually, when you go down to a team level, you start recognising the hot spots – and that’s quite confronting.”
Going beyond headline scores to examine pockets of risk on safety, inclusion and trust, she argued, is where genuine culture change starts – even if it means sitting with discomfort.
ROI on leadership: “Don’t oversell what you can’t prove”
Asked how to tie leadership and capability programs to return on investment, both panellists cautioned HR against promising a neat, linear link to top-line sales.
“You’ve got to be really clear on what ROI means,” Mahon said. “Everyone uses sales as a metric, especially in commercial businesses, but not everything is a direct driver of that.”
He pointed to more realistic measures such as turnover, internal promotion rates and the identification and progression of high-potential talent.
“These programs can help define your high potential talent. High potential talent means you’re going to drive revenue and growth because you have the right people in the future driving your business,” he said.
Ganeriwala agreed that trying to mathematically connect every leadership initiative to revenue growth can backfire.
“I actually think we do ourselves a disservice by saying we can exactly link it to increased top line,” she said. “In my view, it starts from the business need you’re trying to solve.”
She recommended anchoring leadership investments in clearly articulated business problems – for example, the need for bolder decision-making or faster innovation – and then tracking HR “input metrics” such as succession depth, diversity in talent pipelines and leadership bench strength.
Diversity, pipelines and the ‘magic’ of identity
Turning to future leaders and diversity, the panel acknowledged the persistent drop-off of women and other underrepresented groups on the path to senior roles.
Ganeriwala said Unilever’s starting point is simple: the workforce must mirror its consumers.
“Our consumers are diverse. Very often it is the woman who’s buying most of our products,” she noted. “Our organisation needs to reflect the consumers we are serving – only then will we do the right R&D, the right marketing assets.”
Locally, Unilever reports a 50/50 gender balance overall and around 45% women on its executive team. But Ganeriwala emphasised that healthy top-line figures don’t remove the need to examine “hot spots” where representation or pay equality lags.
Finding and developing future leaders relies heavily on career conversations, she said – something many organisations still neglect.
“Performance conversations happen; review conversations happen. Career gets lost,” she said. Unilever is pushing hard to change that, starting with the CEO holding structured career conversations with direct reports, then cascading the practice down.
At Coles, Mahon said diversity is highly visible in stores – from team members with disabilities and neurodivergence to a strong trans community – and that the challenge is to keep that sense of “everyone’s welcome at our table” as the business transforms.
He cited a recent concern: fewer women entering store teams as automation and check-out changes alter frontline roles. Coles is now re-examining job design and attraction strategies “at the bottom of the funnel” to ensure roles are appealing and accessible.
“Yes, there are measures and frameworks,” he said. “But it’s also: what’s that magic of your identity and the reason why people want to work for your company? When you find some of that in your organisation, that’s the magic – and that’s something we never want us to lose.”
Middle managers under pressure – and not everyone wants to lead
In a question from the floor, the panel was asked about the growing pressure on middle managers, who often describe leadership as “extra-curricular” work on top of already-heavy loads – and how to support people who want career growth and higher pay without managing people.
Mahon said the starting point is honest, nuanced talent management.
“It’s important to identify who those people are and have their career conversations,” he said. “If someone doesn’t want to be a people leader, that’s okay – but break down the why. Sometimes we make assumptions that we know why, or they know why.”
He suggested exploring the benefits and trade-offs of leadership, being transparent about expectations and, where people remain uninterested in managing others, designing alternative specialist career pathways that still offer progression.
Acknowledging the wave of restructures and redundancies many organisations have faced, he said clarity and candour about roles and paths forward are more critical than ever.
Leadership for an age of chaos
For Ganeriwala, the essence of modern leadership comes back to something she said at the very beginning of the discussion: “making sense of chaos and dealing with ambiguity”.
With crises in the economy, workplaces and personal lives colliding, she argued, organisations that thrive will be those that equip leaders – at every level – to show vulnerability, have hard conversations with clarity and compassion, and make principled decisions amid uncertainty.
For both Coles and Unilever, that means competency frameworks are no longer static HR artefacts. They are living systems: rooted in values, expressed through everyday behaviours, reinforced by data and sponsorship from the top, and continually reinterpreted for the frontline realities of a changing world.
