Move of the Month: 9/14

Gone now are the days when our leading high-street pharmacy was simply Boots ‘the chemist’.

As of last month, Boots is on course to merge fully with US pill-meisters Walgreens, forming not an international chemist chain as one might have hoped, but ‘the first global pharmacy-led, health and wellbeing enterprise.’

So not a shop, then; not even a retailer. And as an enterprise, the new merged entity (known as Walgreens Boots Alliance, or WBA for short, which might tickle a few football fans in the Midlands) will need some pretty heavy duty HR folk to ensure that its high-falutin’ objectives are properly lived up to.

Step up then, Kathleen Wilson-Thompson, the existing CHRO for Walgreens who takes on an even bigger role in WBA come the merger in Q1 2015. Wilson-Thompson will, according to the press release, become Executive Vice President and Global Chief Human Resources Officer of Walgreens Boots Alliance, which if nothing else probably means she’ll need a longer business card.

Ms Wilson-Thompson – who we’ll call KWT, if only to save my aching fingers – is quite the player in corporate HR circles. She trained and practiced as an employment lawyer, spent 19 years working for Kellogg’s in first a legal and then an HR capacity, and has been with Walgreens since 2010.

Speaking to Talent Management a couple of years ago, KWT set out her stall in pretty clear terms:

Many CHROs like to say that we are business people who have an expertise in HR, and we certainly say that at Walgreens. What’s incumbent upon us as HR professionals is to ensure that we’re living that… Often we get caught in the daily role of delivering HR services, but I consider myself the business partner to the CEO. He has the voice of HR, the voice of his actual 250,000-member team through my lens.

Lenses like KWT’s do not come cheap. According to Forbes, in 2010 she took home nearly $4 million, including stock and option awards from Walgreens and nearly $200k from her additional directorship of Vulcan Materials Co. (Not sure, but I’m guessing they make covers for pointy ears.) How much her latest promotion will add to her take-home is unclear.

Still, she’s clearly good at what she does – she’s also been listed by Black Enterprise magazine as one of its Top 100 Most Powerful Executives in Corporate America. As well as being at Walgreens, KWT finds time to help out at (according to directwomen.org) the NAACP Special Contributions Fund Board of Trustees, The Chicago Children’s Choir, The American Red Cross of Greater Chicago, The Alumni Association of the University of Michigan and the National Advisory Board of the National Civil Right Museum.

Quite a CV, and quite a workload. Wonder how much we’ll see of her in the Boots Nottingham Head Office, or at our local chemists in December when the top brass step in to help with the Christmas rush.

About the author

Andrew Baird

Andrew is the CEO of HRville. He is also Employer Brand Director of Blackbridge Communications, Editorial Director of Professionals in Law and an associate of The Smarty Train. Previously, he was the MD of TCS Advertising.