Jo Pick
Chief People Officer
Wincanton
Jo Pick is the Chief People Officer for Wincanton, a leading logistics company based across the UK & Ireland. Jo leads a team of over 320 HR professionals who support the 20,300 colleagues. Jo drives the development and retention of talent across the Wincanton Group. She also chairs the Wincanton social value steering committee, championing wellbeing, community, and diversity and inclusion.
Jo is a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development. Additionally, she spent 3 years as a non-executive board member for Selby Educational trust, whose mission is “to provide an inspirational and outstanding learning experience for all young people in Selby and the surrounding area.”
A fun fact about Jo, she taught herself to play the drums, and she and 5 other Wincanton executives now play occasionally as the band “Punktured,” most recently at the RAF Brize Norton festival, performing to a crowd of 15,000.
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Give us a brief overview of the path that led to your current role.
Joining Royal Mail as a graduate, Jo then spent 5 years in operations in leadership roles, before finding her passion for leadership was even more impactful in the HR function. She then spent 5 more years in ER and Reward roles.
Jo then moved into a more generalist HR role in Johnson and Johnson. She spent 5 years in a variety of roles culminating as a Programme Director implementing a technological change which provided for the Ulrich model to be implemented. A $6m project delivered transformational change to the UK and Ireland businesses.
Jo then spent 4 years in Greencore, a food manufacturing company in the UK, as HR director, before moving onto Wincanton as People Director. In this role, Jo led the Business partnering team at Wincanton of 180 HR professionals, delivering the people strategy to underpin the growth of the business. She was then appointed as Chief People Officer in November 2023 – a role she relishes.
What is one of your guiding leadership principles?
Authenticity is critical to a successful and fulfilling career, and empathy is critical to performing collaboratively within any team.
What is the greatest challenge CHROs face today, and how are you addressing it?
As always, it’s a challenge to grow capabilities to fit an ever-changing business. For Wincanton, this is about acquiring and developing talent to lead innovation and technology advancements. Whether this is automation and robotics implementation in warehouses, optimising technology in the transport field to impact cost and sustainability for our customer or working with our innovation programme partners to find great new technology for our industry. All these need new capabilities, which are in great demand.
What is the key to success for someone just starting out as a CHRO?
I recommend adopting a growth mindset with lots of curiosity! Learn about what makes the business tick, not just the people function. And make sure that your knowledge gets you a seat at the table and, importantly, a voice on challenges across all the business.
How do you measure success as a leader?
The impact of the people function of the business is the primary success measure. But, impact as a leader should be measured by looking at the succession bench strength in my own team, and their engagement in the business.
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