It’s about being practical, focused, usable and trustworthy

As someone with great experience of change, transformation, and what it feels like to be in a business when you’re in the eye of the storm, Tracey Killen is ideally placed to help Be the Business.

Tracey Killen – a former board director and member of the John Lewis Partnerships executive team – has something to say about why she’s agreed to come onboard as a Be the Business Fellow.

“I just think there’s this opportunity to be an amazing self-help resource for business,” she said. “Be the Business is practical, focused, usable and trustworthy – and it’s all about helping businesses to succeed. There is no other agenda.”

Tracey has a good track record of cutting to the chase like this: during the early 2000s – when the world of retail was flapping about what to do about the internet – Tracey helped the John Lewis Partnership identify the potential of online retailing and take what turned out to be a game-changing leap of faith.

“When we bought buy.com, which became johnlewis.com, we had this idea that maybe, one day in the future, it would take as much as our branch in Oxford Street,” she explained. “Today, it accounts for 60 per cent of the total John Lewis trade.”

A proud John Lewis “lifer”, Tracey started out with the company as an A-level trainee and just carried on rising.

“I loved it from the very start,” she commented. “I was 19, and I very quickly knew that I wanted a section of the shop to run myself because it would be the closest thing I was going to get to running my own shop.”

It didn’t take long – Tracey was soon in charge of stationery and books at the company’s store in Bristol, having the time of her life in the run up to Christmas as she experimented with different displays and strategies to see what resulted in the most sales. “It was absolutely brilliant,” she said. “It was that immediacy – being able to make those decisions to move quickly and pick yourself up when you’ve got something wrong.”

Before too long, the unimaginable happened – she landed a store of her own. “At the time there, there was literally just one other woman running a John Lewis shop,” she remembered. “It’s hard to imagine that now.”

Seven years later, Tracey became personnel director at John Lewis – a role which saw her looking after 84,000 people across John Lewis and Waitrose right up until October 2020, when she decided to retire after 38 years with the company.

The wealth of experience she brings with her to the Be the Business Fellows programme can’t be overstated. “I have real hard experience in change, transformation, about what it feels like to be in a business when you’re in the eye of the storm and trying to navigate your way through to making really good choices,” she added.

Top of her agenda, said Tracey, is to try and encourage business owners to pause and consider their strategy post-Brexit. “The pandemic has so completely dominated the last eight months, and I worry that it’s completely obscured what will happen in January.”

There’s plenty more on her to-do list – everything from skills shortages and diversity to leadership and technology all warrant serious attention – but Tracey certainly sees some incredible opportunities on the horizon for British businesses, too.

“The reality of coronavirus is that it will have shaken some weaker players out of the market.

“So, for those who do get through this period, they need to do so knowing that they’ve created a platform for growth.”

Tracey is currently a non-executive director of Morgan Sindall Group, a UK construction and regeneration business operating in both the commercial and public sectors.

Quick-fire questions

What would be your personal productivity tip?

I think long to-do lists don’t help, so my personal productivity tip is to have no more than three things that you think are really important which you have to get done every day. If the list gets any longer than that, you become massively unproductive. So three things, and they must be things that only you can do.

What do you think SMEs need to watch out for on the horizon?

I think there will be a huge shift in the way people want to work. And that includes things like artificial intelligence, the rise of the freelancer, and how do you create a workplace experience that becomes a really huge lever in productivity? And then there’s leadership. There’s empirical research that shows how a better and more engaged workforce is about three times more productive.

What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever received?

I’d once cocked something up at work and I couldn’t understand it because I’d spent a lot of time engaging people in why we needed to change something. And then someone I worked with said to me: “Communicate, communicate, communicate – and when you really feel you have done enough, go back out and explain why you’re doing it again.” And it’s so true – you just can’t invest enough in helping people understand what you’re trying to achieve. 

If you’d gone down a completely different career path, what would you have been?

An archaeologist. All the way through my childhood I was obsessed by history and I was convinced right up to my middle teens that being an archaeologist was what I wanted to do. I was really interested in understanding how people had lived their lives and how that had influenced the way we live today.