Aldi’s Julie Ashfield: grocery doesn’t need more ‘alpha females’

It’s late, the store is shut and stocktake has dragged on for hours. At just 21, Julie Ashfield is fresh out of university and trying very hard to look like she knows what she’s doing.

Then her boss (Ashfield’s mentor and Aldi’s only female area manager at the time) does something quite unexpected. “She got onto the till belt,” Ashfield recalls, “got a broom and started poking the ceiling tiles. All this stock just fell onto the floor.”

It transpired the store manager had hidden stock to manipulate the inventory count. And although the resulting confrontation between the two was “really aggressive”, the area manager didn’t flinch. “She was just really calm and balanced,” Ashfield says. “She wasn’t intimidated at all.”

Back in 1999, Aldi was still finding its feet in the UK. The culture was uncompromising, and almost everyone in management was male. Almost. The area manager with the broom would unknowingly set the template for Ashfield’s own leadership style: direct, organised and quietly authoritative.

Now, more than 25 years later, Ashfield is one of the most powerful figures in UK grocery, Aldi’s chief commercial officer. But she insists there was never a grand plan.

Joining Aldi straight out of university on a graduate salary of £27k and a fully expensed company car – an eye-watering package at the time – Ashfield was the only female area manager trainee in a cohort of nine.

“It was tough,” she reflects. “But there wasn’t anything Aldi could have done to make me leave. I recognised very early on that this was a great business.”

Not everyone felt the same. Two weeks into the training programme, Ashfield was the only one left. It helped that she’s naturally extroverted and “comfortable hearing my own voice. If I enter a room, you’ll probably know what I need quite quickly,” she laughs. But that confidence brings responsibility.

“I see it at every level: people who want to speak but don’t. And you can’t just tell someone to be more confident – that doesn’t work.”

Instead, she sees it as her responsibility to create space for quieter voices. Meetings are deliberately structured so everyone contributes. “People know their turn’s coming,” she says. “When you’re in a team full of loud, outgoing people, you miss things. Drawing something out of someone often gets a better answer.”

Overcoming ‘alpha female’ management style

That philosophy underpins her view on leadership diversity – and the so-called ‘alpha female’. Historically, she argues, women often reached senior roles by adopting traditionally masculine traits.

She’s honest about her own style. “I know I have those traits – I am overconfident,” she says. “But that can’t be the only model. Not all women in senior leadership roles have to be alpha females. It’s easy to promote women who have typically male traits – but where’s the balance? A blend is the ideal.”

Crucially, she adds, changing leadership norms also benefits men, because “those who don’t have stereotypical traits gain too. Balance gives better outcomes.”

At Aldi, that balance is increasingly visible. Graduate area manager intake has been roughly 50:50 for several years. This matters, because “if your talent pool is balanced, the people you promote from it will be too”. And on Ashfield’s own senior team, women outnumber men five to three among group directors. More strikingly, the Aldi UK board is now 50% female.

“Aldi is, and always has been, a meritocracy,” she says. “We fill the business with the brightest, most capable people we can, while recognising every sector needs to be more balanced at senior level.”

That’s not positive discrimination, she adds, but the logical outcome of doing things properly.

“My appointment was entirely natural – my CV stands up on its own. [Aldi COO] Ruth Doyle’s does too.” The same applies to Aldi CFO Hayleigh Lupino, who joined the board last year. “We weren’t looking for a woman – we were looking for the right person. The fact she’s female is a brilliant addition. It means our board is now 50:50, which is where it should be.”

Progress is far slower on the supplier side, with Ashfield regularly walking into meetings where she and her colleagues are the only women present. “Sadly, the more senior the meeting, the fewer women there are,” Ashfield says. She points to an upcoming supplier dinner: of the 43 supplier CEOs and MDs invited, 41 of them are men. Aldi’s own delegation? Six women out of 11.

“I’m not being critical,” Ashfield stresses. “I understand the scale of the issue. But something has to change, because I’ve seen this my whole career.”

Closer to home

Aldi hasn’t always got it right either. In the early days, area manager training meant months living in hotels across the country. “That wasn’t supportive of women,” she says bluntly. But the solution was simple: Aldi placed trainees closer to home, and retention improved almost immediately.

“It sounds obvious now,” she says. “But you can’t just hope for a 50:50 split. You have to nurture it.”

Ashfield is acutely aware of her own visibility thanks to her role on Channel 4’s Aldi’s Next Big Thing. Her daughter’s teachers frequently use her as a business case study, which she embraces: “I want my daughter and her friends to see how much fun it is ” she says. “how much I love my job.”

When asked for a career highlight, Ashfield doesn’t hesitate: “Being promoted at 38 weeks pregnant.” Her boss at the time, Tony Baines, told her she had the job days before she was due to give birth. No caveats. No concern about the year she was about to take off.

“He thought I was the right person,” she says. “The timing wasn’t ideal – but it didn’t stop him.” It was, she believes, a defining moment. “ That tells you everything about what Aldi stands for.”

Across the wider industry, though, there’s no single fix for its gender imbalance, Ashfield says. If there were, it would already be in place. The ultimate goal, of course, is to stop talking about female leadership altogether.  “One day,” she says, “we’ll just talk about leadership. We need women to believe they’re good enough – that they’re the best person in the room.”