Tag: organizational development

Question: Which part of your job are you most proud to talk about?

Response: I don’t know if pride is the right word. But the part I find most meaningful is this: as a CEO, nothing works if you try to do it alone. You can set a direction, you can define a strategy, you can explain the “why” and the “how.” But if that’s all you do, it won’t be successful.

What really matters is the alchemy between the strategy you put in place and the fact that people actually choose to follow you. Not just because the plan makes sense, but also because, on a human level, they want to follow you. When both come together, that’s when I’ll be able to look back and say: yes, this is something I can be proud of.

How do you know that your strategy is not only understood but truly lived?

There are two sides to this.

First, the hard metrics: if a strategy is truly lived, you see it in the results. The P&L moves in the direction you expect. The business performs the way the strategy intended.

But equally important are the soft indicators — and I pay a lot of attention to those. We survey engagement and morale at least once a year, often more frequently, and we look at it in quite some depth. If the financial results are on track and the engagement and satisfaction indicators are trending upward, then I can say: yes, the strategy is not just understood — it’s embodied in the organisation.

What, in your daily routine, is the best indicator of a healthy corporate culture?

For me, the key question is: Are we in a safe zone? Meaning, do people dare to speak up?

This is something you should be able to feel in everyday interactions. Does it happen on a regular basis that people come up to you with something  unexpected, maybe even something that might irritate you at first. That’s often a good sign. At least they tell you. And that is much harder to achieve than it sounds.

Because you can say that speaking up is welcome, or that it’s okay to talk about mistakes. But people only believe it if you act accordingly. And you notice it especially with people you don’t interact with regularly: when they speak up in meetings, raise concerns, challenge something — not out of disloyalty, but out of ownership. That’s when I think: yes, the culture is healthy. Even if it’s hard to measure.

How do you handle disagreements within your leadership team?

First, by addressing them within the leadership team. It’s normal that some issues surface in one-to-ones, and that’s fine. But I want the team to bring topics into the collective forum, because that’s where they get solved.

My leadership team also knows, when they bring me a problem, I’ll usually ask two questions:

1) If the issue crosses departmental boundaries, have you spoken with your counterparts? Is everyone aware of the same facts? Often the answer becomes clear just by doing that.

2) If everyone is aligned on the problem but not on the solution, then it’s a topic for the management team to decide together. And if the team still can’t agree, then it’s my role to take the final decision.

But overall, I try to reinforce the spirit of: don’t escalate everything upwards. Address things among yourselves first. It’s healthier for the organisation and for the team dynamic.

When you look at Rexel as an organisation, what are the challenges you face in maintaining your competitive edge?

I think, first you need to consider: How do you define your competitive edge? What really sets you apart? And how simply can you frame that promise to the customer?

For us, as a B2B distributor, the customer promise is a mix of three things: the breadth of your assortment, the availability of that assortment, and supply chain predictability. If a customer needs a specific item, do we have it in stock? And if we promise next-day delivery, does it actually arrive the next day?
It sounds very simple, but defining this promise clearly — and delivering it consistently — is not that easy.

Internally, and in B2B distribution more broadly, we call this the offer plan. What is your offer plan? What is your category management? And which parts of the assortment are your absolute essentials? Because our portfolio is extremely broad — roughly 600,000 products on the website, but we only stock around 30,000 to 50,000 of them. Making that logic clear, simple, and reliable is a major part of maintaining our competitive edge.

The easy part is the “bread and butter”: the items you always carry, the ones customers know you can deliver next day, no matter what. That’s the foundation — and in our business, it’s still the number one driver of differentiation.

Once you have that in place, you move to more elaborate levels: service offerings, planning capabilities, solutions for projects, lighting, industrial automation, photovoltaics, and so on. And the question then becomes: how do you bundle all of this so customers don’t just come with a product list, but with an objective — “Here’s what I want to achieve. How can you help?”

And on these more elaborate parts of the offer — are you already experimenting with AI? Are you using any AI-based solutions today?

Yes, absolutely. We’re using AI in many areas.

The most obvious one is our webshop. More than 50% of our turnover — and we’re close to a billion in turnover — is generated online. So a lot is happening there. Our search engine already uses AI, and a few months ago we launched an AI-powered chatbot on the webshop as well.

But AI is also embedded in the tools we offer our customers. Take our photovoltaic simulation tool: it uses AI — some developed internally, some with external partners – so you can scan a roof via Google Maps, the system automatically analyses sun exposure, angles, shadows, and so on, and then proposes the optimal PV configuration. And with one click, the entire list goes straight into your basket.

And all of that is already live today?

Yes, it’s live — and it’s used a lot. We run many PV simulations, at all scales. Even quite small ones, like a PV installation for the roof of a single house. Because as a B2B distributor, we also work with many very small customers in the end.

Where do you see the biggest gaps between theoretical knowledge and the practical implementation of strategies?

I think the biggest gap — or at least the hardest equation — is the pendulum between sales and margin. In every sales negotiation, and ultimately in pricing, you constantly ask yourself: how far do I go for more sales, and how far do I go for more margin? Balancing those two is never straightforward.

Since you’ve combined purchasing and marketing – which many companies keep separate – does that help manage this internal tension? How does it play into the equation?

For us, purchasing and marketing belong together because in the end it’s all about the offer plan — which categories you want to push, which assortments you prioritise, and under which conditions you negotiate with suppliers. And all of that eventually needs to translate into pricing that is consistent for the customer.

Other companies often struggle with that separation. When the functions are split, they often end up in artificial debates that disappear once you integrate them.

Exactly. You always need good synchronisation between sales on one side and purchasing plus pricing on the other. But if you add a third separate function, coordination becomes even harder.

But to your earlier question — is this just an internal struggle? Not necessarily. Because once the structures, assortments, and pricing logic are set and implemented in the systems, the real practical question is: what price do I offer to the customer?

In B2B, every customer has a different price. Every customer will ask for discounts. And every day, hundreds of salespeople face the same dilemma: do I push volume and give away more price, or do I hold the price and risk losing volume? That’s the most common negotiation scenario for us.

And of course, some negotiations have much higher stakes — for example with multi-million-euro customers where frame contracts are involved. Then the question becomes: how much do you give on one side versus the other? And as in any negotiation, how do you frame the whole picture? It’s not just the price. You have terms and conditions. You have hidden levers like delivery frequency.

For the customer that might not matter much…

Exactly. If I ask you how often you want to be delivered, you might say, “twice or three times a week is fine.” For you as a customer it changes nothing. But for us as a distributor, it can have a huge impact — because it saves entire rounds of logistics. These are meaningful negotiation levers.

And how do you ensure this is handled consistently across the organisation? Many companies rely on individual negotiators, which creates huge differences in approach and outcome.

Yes, that’s a real risk. For us, consistency starts with empowerment. We are organised regionally, and each region has clear goals — sales targets and margin targets. We try to strike a balance: we set clear expectations, but we don’t go too deep into prescribing every detail, because there will always be special situations with customers.

I trust the regional sales directors to make the right decisions, as long as the overall results are there.

And there’s one more thing I would add — and this comes from my background in purchasing: you need to be comfortable with uncomfortable situations. In sales, you constantly have discussions with customers. And while we are very customer-focused, in the end we don’t share the same P&L. So the real challenge is: am I comfortable raising points that might be uncomfortable for the customer, but still necessary to address? That’s a big part of negotiation maturity.

Let me switch to something more personal. What is the most important lesson you learned this year?

For me, the biggest lesson is that your personal impact is not proportionate to the time you invest. This is my first CEO role, and you realise very quickly that at some point it’s not about what you do, but about what people take from what you do — how they understand the strategy, how they apply it.

So time allocation becomes crucial. How much time do you spend structuring things down to the smallest detail — which has its limits — versus spending time ensuring people truly understand the direction and the “why”? That trade-off is a major lesson for me.

So communication becomes more important, while thinking remains important but takes a different share of your time.
What questions do you ask yourself to stay on track?

The main one is exactly that: my personal time allocation.

And two sub-questions guide it:

1. Do I spend enough time explaining and spreading what we want to do — especially the “why”?
   The “why” is essential.
2. Do I take enough time to pause, reflect, and think strategically?

These are usually the first things that disappear when you’re running from meeting to meeting. And when that happens, you lose the time for communication and the time for reflection.

And are there any skills or areas you’re currently trying to develop further?

Personally? Well, German — that’s the obvious one.

But from a leadership perspective, it’s an ongoing process. How do you play the full range of leadership behaviours intentionally? Not by forcing anything, but by being aware that elements like your body language, how you enter a room, the energy you bring — all of that sends a message.

What, then, is the message you want to give and are you actually giving it?
And that ties back to time allocation again — if you’re constantly running from one thing to another, you might not convey what you intend. Meaning is transported by many more layers than just by what you say.