You have significant experience setting up and transforming people departments—what has that journey been like at American Golf?

If we step right back to the beginning, one of the first things that all the directors did at American Golf was to socialise the strategy and vision for the business with everyone who works there, so everybody understood the journey that we were on. Quite often, companies can go off in a direction, but not necessarily engage and bring the teams with them.

Coming into the business just over a year ago, we had a very talented group of people working in our people team, but it was structured quite traditionally in what I would call an ‘old personnel’ way—very administrative, rather than being a future-facing people team.

It was all very office-based and when you think that 90% of our team members work out in stores right across the UK and Ireland, it's important as a people team that we're out there working alongside and supporting our teams.

We've rebuilt our structure, putting people business partners out to work with our area manager team. It’s about giving the people team visibility, so we have a face within the business and we're much more accessible rather than sitting in a room behind a door.

The team is now out in an open-plan office, or working out in the field, and they have much more of a presence, coaching and working alongside the teams to develop their leadership skills and how they can be a better version of themselves.

What talent mapping and succession planning programmes have you put into place?

To start with talent mapping, we've worked hard this year to gain visibility of every single person who works across the business and where they are currently on their career journey, identifying our top talent who are our backbone team members.

We’re looking at where we have team members who have the opportunity to be even better and have built out a talent framework, calibrating our teams right the way across the business. It means we can have proper career conversations with people and understand their aspirations.

Not everybody wants to be the CEO. Some people absolutely love their job. They want to do a great job every day and for them, it's more about how we enhance what they're doing and maybe giving them broader accountabilities within their day-to-day.

And then some people do want to be the next CEO, so how can we start to give them support, structure, and development interventions to help them grow on their journey?

We've worked hard at putting a process and rigour around that, but also having very visible and clear KPIs so that we can fairly and equitably manage performance. You will always get far better results when you engage a team with their KPIs – why those KPIs exist, what they're helping to deliver, and then inspiring them to deliver them – rather than an old-school approach.