Only As Strong

One thing I know to be true…you are only as strong as those around you.  Your people compliment you, challenge you and more importantly build the stepping stones to your management and leadership style. When managing stores, this is the only constant I have ever wanted to achieve.

Managing can be chaotic and challenging. 

• Why has it been so hard to attract the talent needed to achieve this team dynamic?
• Why is it so hard to fathom the training justifications behind this concept?
• Are managers afraid to find candidates that challenge them? 
• Are managers under too much pressure to fill roles? 
• Are managers putting too much time constraints on training opportunities?

Just a few questions I wish I could answer, but honestly, it isn’t up to me to determine the why’s, only how I did it. It wasn’t an overnight thing. It took a long time for me to trust myself and my ego. Will they turn out better than me? Get promoted faster? Get recognized by people you only dream of noticing you? Ego. Time to get it over it if you want a successful store.

Know what you are missing on your team. I wrote before of the trifecta. The perfect balance of skillset and the beginning of bench strength. You need these things in your stores to be productive. When you realize what’s missing, you need to go out there and find the missing pieces, train them and develop them. Find your you. Find the ones that may have more experience, but lacked a mentor. Find someone who is the opposite of you and learn from their mindset. The point is to not be afraid. Don’t feel rushed. Upper level management may pressure you to find a candidate, but remember, it’s your store. Only you know what works and what doesn’t work.

I have made that mistake before. I relied on upper level management to dictate my needs and the result was a disaster. Never again. I was playing politics and it nearly destroyed my management style and my management team. You also have to remember training takes time. Everyone is different. Sometimes people’s learning abilities are harder to develop. You need to learn patience and self-control. You can’t force people to master what you already know in a short period of time. It is up to you as a manager to determine how to best manage this important time. Remember to look around you. Who is best at ABC? An operations specialist shouldn’t train a new hire on merchandising. A short-tempered key holder should not train anyone on how to use the registers. Someone who processes shipment probably isn’t the best person to train on fitting room selling. I know that this all seems straight forward, but store managers work with what they have. Who is working when. The schedule says… so they do.

This is a failure in utilizing your people’s skills and abilities. It gets you nowhere and takes a toll on your teams’ character and most of all your reputation as a leader. Remember, you are only as strong as those around you. If they aren’t being empowered to grow, you might as well find something else to do. You will experience a turn style of lack luster employees and spend most of your time interviewing prospects instead of developing your teams. You will be fighting a never-ending battle of personalities and time wasters. Don’t fall into that hole. Take the time to find the missing pieces of your vision. 

Choose Your Own Adventure

One of my favorite book series I loved to read growing up was the "Choose Your Own Adventure" stories by Edward Packard. It opened my mind to variety of scenarios and gave me the ability to explore adventures with different outcomes.

The memory of these books brings to mind, don't laugh, our current state of retail. An interesting observation, right? As managers, we have the ability to choose many different paths each day. Although there are only 24 hours in a day, those 24 hours can have immediate impact on a single course of action. Albeit, employee development, store appearance, customer interactions, operational systems…you get the picture. It is up to you to determine what kind of impact you are going to make.

I know there are many critics out there saying retail is struggling to survive, but I see it prospering everywhere I go, the problem isn’t stores in general, new stores and small businesses open every day, its people. People are the problem. Managers, YOU are choosing the wrong adventure.

I find that there are two types of managers. Those that can and don’t vs. those that do and choose. All managers have the ability to be successful, but something happens along the way that takes a mindset from a passion to lead to a safe mentality. That something, is usually a wrong decision made either by a superior that affected them poorly or a decision made internally that brought on a negative result. The can and don’ts come from this error in judgement. These managers go with a popular decision process. One that will be accepted to maintain a level of consistency. I am not saying that this is wrong or unsuccessful, but it can become comfortable and underwhelming.

The do and choose are the managers that do whatever it takes and choose not to give up on making a difference. We need more of this type in the business world. Managers that choose to stand out in a crowd and go against the grain in terms of process and people are ones that are always looking for that next adventure. They make unpopular decisions, mistakes and end up being put in an outcast category. Oftentimes their paths are rocky, stressful and a battleground of what if’s. What makes this type of manager interesting is that their decisions and mistakes often bring prosperous results, tenured teams and desired organizational strategies.

Unfortunately, these managers never seem to last long in organizations. WHY?? Wouldn’t it be wise to choose the adventure of rocky paths and individuality over the path of knowing the outcome? Wouldn’t it be wise to choose the manager that isn’t afraid of making a mistake? Wouldn’t it make better sense to choose an adventure that changes the mindset and opens the door to new possibilities? Something needs to change. The store environments we walk into today are filled with disgruntled employees, comfortable employees, lost employees and more importantly, employees ignoring customers because YOU choose the wrong approaches in your leadership style every day. Retail isn’t dying. The successful businesses have grown from their mistakes and prospered. The do and choose managers have opened their own stores and are leading the way in making a difference in communities because the can and don'ts have given them no other choice. It's up to you to choose your next adventure. Choose wisely. Your businesses are depending on you to make the right decision.

Growth

What does this word mean to you? To me, there is growth in position and growth in mental abilities. Both are needed in order to have a successful team and business. I am not just referring to your people, but also to you as a leader. Over the years I have watched peers and employees grow into incredible leaders, business owners and vibrant members of the community. I myself have grown tremendously from what I would say was a strange and crazy trip from the years 18-the present. Who I WAS definitely has shaped who I AM. The struggles I went through have helped define who I have become as a manager, a boss and now a business owner.

When I was 23 I was promoted to store manager of my first store. YES…23! I find that to be an unusual fact about my management career (although now that doesn’t seem so weird to others).  I was fresh out of college and my boss left to have a baby. I think back to that person I was at the time. A 90’s club kid. If you don’t know what that means believe me…I shouldn’t have been running a multi-million dollar business, but I did so with determination to be the best store manager I could be. I soaked up all the knowledge and advice I could get.

“Someone believed in me and gave me the opportunity. They knew I could be molded into what they needed me to be and grow into the position they saw for me.”

–Me, at 23, becoming a SM for the first time.

Think about that for a second and ask yourselves, when was the last time you hired someone or promoted someone with this idea in mind? The idea that there was a spark in someone and YOU wanted to develop it so that person could meet their true potential and grow into a manager that you knew they could become. This has now become one of my favorite management style traits. It leads me to the best part of being a manager…developing 

My favorite position on a management team will always be… manager–in-training or key holder or sales/team lead or department manager.  Whatever you want to call it, they all mean the same thing, a developmental managerial role with keys. You have the chance to mold someone into a position that they themselves didn’t know they had in them. It is a position that reflects a spark you, as their leader and mentor, saw in them. It is a position that allows them to explore what type of manager they want to become. It is often the first time they have ever had a lot of responsibility and definitely the first time they have ever managed people. I like to observe how they handle the first day of responsibility and go from there by asking a series of questions in my mind. Will they become power hungry? Will they become an associates’ confidant? Will they embrace a way of thinking and become a leader? How will they handle a tough situation? What type of direction will they give? When will they realize that they are in charge and have to make decisions? It is at that time that spark happens in them. They either love it or hate it. When I see it, I start the development process and steer them in the direction that makes sense to them. There is no forced training plan or process, just an open mind to learn.

The same goes for any person new to a role. Everyone handles their new responsibility differently. It is important not to hinder their growth through trying to get them to learn the way you did. I have talked about being a chameleon before and now it is more important than ever. Your management training abilities have to be on point or you may lose that spark that originally got them there in the first place. No one wants that. No one wants to start over. No one wants to feel like they failed someone. This is how you grow as a manager and into a leader that can respected. An accomplishment that means something. 

Experience Does Matter

Through the years I have heard these words from upper level management or hiring managers “your experience doesn’t necessarily matter, how you adapt to the culture and earn our respect does.” Really? I always struggled with holding my emotions in check when that phrase was uttered. I found it fascinating to hear. Maybe I was too old or not the right look or over qualified or too opinionated or overzealous in decision making. Excuses. That is what they are. Whatever it was, it dampened my passion to be the best I could be and I don’t want it to happen to you. At the end of the day I never had an unsuccessful store or team. That must mean something…right?

I find that people are afraid of experience. They are afraid of people who may know more about topics then they do. I always found the opposite true. Experience is the cornerstone of any successful business.  Why? Because you have experienced several different scenarios at several different levels while trying new approaches through trial and error. Why wouldn’t that be considered a plus or at least a determination to want to know more?

While perusing through applications/resumes for the hiring of certain positions, I always looked to those applicants that had layers to their careers. I never was afraid to talk to them nor intimidated by their level of expertise. I always knew that they may not be affordable, but I would try my hardest to sell them on the company and the culture. Lord knows I have taken some pay cuts to acquire a position I felt passionately about. But not everyone is willing to do the same. It has to make sense and people need to be able to see the light at the end of the tunnel. After all you are not only interviewing the candidate, they are interviewing you and the company as well.

I am hoping that through writing about this that somehow, somewhere someone will figure out that experience does matter. Think about it…You are bringing a candidate on board that’s only focus for you would be sales generation and people development. Why wouldn’t you want that? Of course, they would have to learn the ins and outs of the company, but in reality, everything you dream of for an employee is already there. You need to let them run with it and watch them take the lead, grow the business and build a positive reputation with your customer base. Managers need to put their pride on the back burner and focus on the gifts of the people that sit in front of them. I get it… in this day and age, a person needs to fit the culture of the business, but isn’t that something that can be adapted as the employee works day-by-day and side-by-side other employees and customers? Wouldn’t you much rather have a person in place that already gets it? Wouldn’t you then want that person to build you up and make you look good? The next time you are interviewing or writing a performance appraisal, think about the word experience in relation to that person. If you can’t think of scenarios that match their abilities, you aren’t doing your job.

The Domino Effect

Tenure. It’s an amazing thing. There is nothing in the world like having a team that sticks around. As a manager or business owner, watching your people grow into roles is probably the most rewarding trait of being a successful manager. At least it was for me. Nothing made me prouder than to watch someone grow from a part timer into high level. How this happens is what I like to call the domino effect.

Your store is a breeding ground for amazingness…if you allow it. Some leaders don’t like seeing others succeed. I always found this odd, but I understood it. People fear strength. It’s true. Some managers like to keep people at a certain level to control them. This is a hard fact to consider, but it is something those managers need to recognize with in themselves. This can most certainly lead to losing good people and spread negativity like a cancer through the store. Your business’s environment is what YOU make it.

It all starts out with hiring. Are you hiring the right people? You should be looking for certain traits when interviewing candidates. Traits like motivation and belief in abilities. Starting at the part time level (we will get into interviewing later). When they’re hired, you are constantly observing and recognizing strengths and opportunities. As you adapt your training to match their abilities, you start to see potential. It is when you start noticing that same individual share your training and philosophies with others that the domino effect begins. When people feel empowered, supported and challenged they stick around. It makes the 4-walls more fun to work in. After all, when we spend most of our time in our businesses shouldn’t we WANT to be there? Shouldn’t there be a purpose to why we work long hours? Shouldn’t there be a positive reason to show up to work every day?

Not every person you hire will stick around. It is usually because it wasn’t just for them. Retail is hard. Some will have opportunities doing something else. It’s a free world. There are many choices for everyone, but always ask yourself…did you do everything in your power to make an impact on that person? Maybe you turned a shy seller into a top seller. Maybe you taught someone to become more organized. Maybe you impacted his or her thinking which in turn allowed them to open-up and become a better person. Believe it or not, you have the power to make these things happen. Just don’t ignore the one’s that got away. Look inside yourself and determine the whys.

Do you have any stories, experiences or comments? I would love to hear your thoughts.