Stars of the future

Apologies for the lack of posts last week, didn’t seem to be at my desk very much. On Thursday I was busy judging this year’s Retail Week Rising Star Awards, which is always a fun day. We get all the candidates to come down to our offices, bring in our judging panel of senior retailers, divide everyone into groups and give our rising stars a gentle grilling.

This year is I think the sixth time the Awards have been run and the standard was higher than ever, as more and more major retailers enter their emerging talent. Some retailers worry that if their people win they’ll end up being poached by their rivals, but history shows that’s not the case and actually the vast majority of winners have ended up progressing within their existing companies.

I was chairing the judging of the store managers from the south east, and then the north of England, alongside New Look’s HR director Ann Chan and Steve Leach of Boots, a first time judge. In all honesty we didn’t see a bad candidate all day. In previous years we’ve had people who looked good on paper but didn’t deliver in person, but this year everyone we saw was enthusiastic and very confident talking about their achievements.

And they had plenty to talk about. Whether it was taking on a store which was notorious in their company, moving from one end of the country to the other, or leading the launch of a pilot new format store, all of them had creatively dealt with whatever challenges their company had thrown at them and had the results to prove it.

Ann and Steve agreed on so much that I did start to believe they might be the same person - they’d even highlighted the same paragraphs in their judging packs - but at the end we did have a very lively debate about who should be highly commended in the northern category. Obviously I can’t say any more but the winners will be revealed at the Grosvenor House on September 8. It’s fair to say everyone lets their hair down on the night, and I can thoroughly recommend coming along.