Yahoo Finance John Lewis boss faces showdown as staff vote on her leadership
The chairman of John Lewis faces a confidence vote on her leadership this week amid an ongoing battle to turn around the struggling retailer.
In what could be a reckoning for Dame Sharon White, a group of partners have requested that the vote be held secret on Tuesday which will determine their opinion of John Lewis’s strategy and direction.
Dame Sharon is under growing pressure after John Lewis, which also owns Waitrose, posted £234m in losses in March and scrapped its staff bonus for the third consecutive year.
The company is also considering watering down its staff ownership model which has been in place for more than 70 years by selling a stake to an outside investor in an effort to raise up to £2bn.
John Lewis’s 74,000 employees share the running and profits of the business, making it the biggest employee-owned company in Britain.
Tuesday’s vote will be held by a council of around 60 members who have been elected by their colleagues.
The council ballot, which takes place twice a year, is seen as a key test of staff confidence in Dame Sharon’s chairmanship, although the outcome is not formally binding.
Two votes will be cast with the first looking at the past year and the retailer’s progress under Dame Sharon, with a second for her future strategy.
Since joining as chairman in 2020, Dame Sharon has been closing stores and cutting staff in an effort to revive the company. The former Ofcom boss has also launched a renewed focus on John Lewis’s financial services division and revealed plans to invest £500m in building 1,000 rental homes.
Members of the council have requested a secret ballot amid concerns that their identities will be publicly outed, a John Lewis spokesman confirmed.
A company spokesman said: “Our Partnership model is what makes John Lewis and Waitrose special and will always be the heart of our business. It has helped us build the strong and well-capitalised business that we have today.”
Writing in The Telegraph in April, Dame Sharon said she would “preserve what makes the John Lewis Partnership unique” by continuing to be a retailer built on “social purpose”.
The retailer appointed a chief executive officer, Nish Kankiwala, for the first time in its history to help tackle the problems.
