How Pattison Food Group’s Heidi Ferriman takes the lead
Earlier this year, Pattison Food Group made changes to its senior leadership team to position the company “for a new era of growth focusing on fresh, value and customer service—both internally with our people and externally with our customers.” Among the changes was the addition of marketing and customer loyalty to the functions overseen by Heidi Ferriman, an SVP since 2019, who was already responsible for people and corporate affairs.
Having began her grocery career at Save-On-Foods in 2000, Ferriman was elevated to the executive team in 2018. When Pattison Food Group was formed in 2021 to realize synergies across Jim Pattison Group’s grocery banners, including Save-On-Foods, Buy-Low Foods and Choices Markets in Western Canada, Ferriman took on additional responsibilities, including corporate affairs.
Here, the Vancouver native (a 2019 Star Women in Grocery winner and a 2023 Jim Pattison Group Special Achievement award winner) talks about the “people” side of her role as senior vice-president, people, marketing and corporate affairs, from her approach to empowering team members to the partnerships Pattison Food Group has forged in leadership development.
You oversee numerous teams at Pattison Food Group: people, labour relations, marketing, customer loyalty and corporate affairs including ESG. What are the keys to balancing the needs of multiple teams?
I consider myself very fortunate. The leaders on my teams are incredible, as are the team members. But, having the right leadership in place to ensure the teams have clear direction, strong backing from their manager and the right amount of autonomy to do what they believe are the right things, is critical. Pushing decision-making down to the lowest level possible, allowing team members to make decisions that affect them while also ensuring they're accountable for those decisions is important. One of the most impactful things I’ve learned in my career is how critical it is to put trust in our people. They are educated and experts in their fields and we should rely on that expertise. Changes to our industry are happening fast, and as we face new hurdles, we have to count on the collaboration of our teams. When we trust our teams, that is when we see them soar and unlock the potential for excellence. As leaders, it’s our responsibility to ensure our teams are comfortable with us [and] that they understand we have been in their shoes! It’s the connections with the people on our teams that ultimately make us, and our organizations, successful. Nobody wants to work in an environment that isn’t supportive. Being kind, authentic and trusting our people can foster the desire for the team to do extraordinary things. It is absolutely the support of my team that has been the catalyst for success at managing a diverse portfolio.
Interestingly, an area of priority for you is leader development. Tell us a bit about some of this work at the mid- to junior levels.
Leader development is a priority for us and is something we take very seriously. In the last five years we’ve developed a significant learning management system offering more than 800 courses to our team members from operations-based training such as shrink training, to leadership training to EQ-types of courses. And we’ve seen some very ambitious team members who have completed more than 100 courses!
We’ve partnered with external organizations and educational institutes such as Athabasca University (AU) and for six years now the AU program has provided our mid-level office managers and assistant store managers an amazing and desirable certificate program focused on leadership development, providing transfer credits to other post-secondary diploma and degree programs. FranklinCovey and Disney Institute have also been extremely popular programs for our mid-level managers, and we use these programs to not only put individual development plans in place for our high potential team members, but also for those leaders who may be struggling. Our goal is to support our people, even when they are struggling, by providing them with the right tools to get back on track. We are just entering our sixth cohort of our master’s degree sponsorship program. We’ve now sponsored 29 leaders to obtain their master’s degree and 10 have graduated. The graduates of these programs come away with important collaboration and communication skills and with a more entrepreneurial, strategic and analytical mindset, which is critical for our business’ success.
We also run formal internally developed leadership programs, which focus on new department managers and assistant store managers. These programs provide these leaders with opportunities to collaborate with their peers, dive into important topics and better understand their leadership style and how they can make meaningful changes in their stores or departments.
We know that by investing in the success of our team members, we’re continuing to build a pipeline of future leaders. And while we may not see an immediate return on this investment, we know these tools will have a positive impact on the company for the future and is something we can measure over the course of time.
What about executive succession planning?
When leaders reach the executive level, they have a wide array of experience under their belts, which is important as it gives us flexibility to make people moves that make sense for the company. In terms of succession planning, we ensure we develop our leaders and provide them with opportunities to stretch themselves and grow in their roles so the up-and-coming group is ready when opportunities present themselves. Identifying development opportunities and putting formal development plans in place for our high-potential team members so we ensure we prepare a talent pool that is ready for their next moves, continues to be a big priority for us. Succession planning is a huge investment and one where we can always get better, but we are seeing gains and success with the comprehensive assessments and leader development programs we have in place.
READ: Contemplating a succession? Here are five points to consider
Companies obviously hire outside when looking for some leaders. As someone who has been within the Pattison Food Group umbrella for almost 25 years, how important is to also cultivate and retain staff that have grown with the company and help maintain institutional knowledge?
We have a very unique culture in that many of our team members are just like me and have grown up in this business. The job of all 30,000 of us is to sell groceries, keep our customers happy and invite new customers to our stores—we can’t do any of that successfully without the commitment of our people. When I look at the tenure in our company, it’s amazing to see how many people have chosen grocery as their career and we can’t underestimate the power of institutional knowledge and what our teams can do with that knowledge.
People want to work with organizations that care about them. I saw this Simon Sinek Ted Talk recently and he spoke about how, as parents, we work hard to give our children the best opportunities possible, and he emphasized how as leaders we should absolutely be doing the same thing for our teams. It’s not rocket science: if we look out for our people, have their backs and think about what we are doing and what we can do to help them be successful, fulfilled and happy at work, chances are we’ll retain that talent. And while we always try and leverage the extensive experience of our team members first, we understand that the world is changing and there are times when we need outside perspectives and new skillsets to keep innovating and leading the way.
What fulfills you outside of work that makes you a better leader at work?
It’s so important to have a healthy work-life balance and a strong support system outside of the office. My family and friends are that for me—they help me keep perspective on what’s important. A healthy lifestyle that keeps me active is very therapeutic and helps me to better deal with the demands I face both at home and at work.
