In the final episode of the season, HBR editor Adi Ignatius interviews Jason Buechel, the CEO of Whole Foods. Buechel discusses the challenges of succeeding a larger-than-life executive, the role of Whole Foods as a subsidiary of Amazon, and how the company is addressing changes in the business environment, such as climate change and hybrid work. Buechel emphasizes the importance of understanding the voice of team members during a leadership transition and being authentic as a leader. He also highlights Whole Foods’ focus on growth opportunities for employees and its commitment to sustainability. Buechel believes that AI will fundamentally change the retail and grocery shopping experience in the next decade. The episode concludes with Buechel sharing his favorite products from Whole Foods.
At HBR, we love to give people practical takeaways. You’re not the first and you won’t be the last to succeed an iconic CEO who’s been in place for many years. What’s your advice to people who are in your role and coming in? What have you learned from the process that you’d like to share?It’s important to understand the voice of the team members.
That career allowed me to connect with several executives at Whole Foods Market, our former Co-CEO, Walter Robb and CFO, Glenda Flanagan. As they were looking to hire a new CIO or CTO, they had reached out to me. I had provided some names of some clients that I thought would be good folks to go for the job, and they reached back out and said, “Why aren’t you putting your name on? We’d really love for you to consider joining Whole Foods.
We are very privileged in a number of ways. First and foremost, one of the things we’ve been really excited about over the last six years is we’re really focused on the long-term of Whole Foods Market and being able to have the support of Amazon providing us with capabilities that allow us to serve our customer in the most amazing ways possible.
One of the things we launched earlier this year is the ability to have items directly shipped to our customer’s homes through Amazon. We currently have over 800 products available within our exclusive brands, our 365 brand as an example. That’s something we can serve more customers in new ways. A lot of our customers like to shop through multiple different channels. In some cases they’d like to have center of store picked for them and ready for them to pick it up when they shop the store, and then look at our perimeter, whether it’s picking out their own meat or seafood or interacting with our team members. As an example, at our cheese case, a certified cheese professional can help choose exactly the right cheeses as you’re putting together your cheeseboard and charcuterie plates.
For our most senior leadership positions, we’ve helped cross-pollinate and have leaders work across multiple different parts of the company. That was something I was privileged to be part of, being able to lead multiple different functions before stepping into this role. We’ve also built some programs around our senior leadership and other leaders that we have within our store support group, and actually pairing them with stores and partnering up with our store team leaders, and finding ways that we can better support our stores, and ultimately making sure that we can bring those experiences where our store support team members really understand everything that’s happening day-to-day in a store, what it takes to lead a store, and how do we help improve our team...
It’s figuring out that right balance, but the responsibility I personally have is serving as our internal leader, and making sure that our team members understand the vision that we have as an organization. I’m spending time directly in our stores, connecting with our team members, making sure that they understand where we are going, and making sure we can get feedback. My job is to be a servant leader in serving our stores.
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