COO-king on gas

BBC DG Tim Davie has lighted up on Leigh Tavaziva, 47, as its new Chief Operating Officer. She comes from Centrica/British Gas, where, most recently as Managing Director, UK Customer Operations,  she has being trying to instil into the organisation a "customer obsession". Maybe there was a better word... 

She's available to start in the New Year, which suggests she might have been caught up in recent executive churn at Centrica. Leigh will run Design and Engineering (from whence Matthew Postgate departed), Finance, Legal, Commercial Rights and Business Affairs (from whence Bal Samra is departing), Quality, Risk and Assurance, and Procurement. And she gets to sit on both the Executive Committee and the BBC Board. 

Zimbabwe-born Leigh's first love was dance - as Leigh Saunders, she spent two seasons with the BalletMet in Columbus, Ohio in the early 90s. She came to England and joined partner Brawen Tavaziva, a dancer and choreographer who had come from Zimbabwe to work with Phoenix Dance in Leeds. She started with British Gas in 2000, acquiring Chartered Management Accountant status in 2002, to build on a degree in Economics and Industrial Psychology from the distance-learning University of South Africa. 

She likes a park run, distance swimming, and, with 37 Centrica colleagues, took on a five-day trek up a Moroccan mountain in 2010. 

When she was Group Director of Strategy and Transformation at Centrica, she claims to have shifted employee engagement scores from 38% to 75% in less than 12 months. Will she share Year One at the BBC ?