Month: February 2016

Seasonal Employees In Retail

Seasonal Employees In Retail Sitting in my home office this morning working through some business strategies, I heard my kiddos in their room talking about summer break and all of the things they want to do, places they want to go for fun over the summer. It made me realize that the summer season is, indeed, almost upon us. Much like holiday time, it is a great time to reinvigorate and infuse your team with support staff for the peak shopping season(s). There is a frequently unacknowledged reality in retail that seasonal employees are the embodiment of revolving door employees and that we need not invest in them as we would permanent employees because “they are only here for a short period ofRead More

The Importance of Onboarding [And Red Flag Warnings To Watch For]

The Importance of Having An Onboarding Strategy [And Red Flag Warnings] Shockingly, one of every 25 employees leaves on their very first day! – Capabiliti by qustn 35% of companies spend “ZERO” dollars on onboarding. You read that correctly… $0.00 dollars, Yet, organizations with an engaging and structured onboarding process experience 54% greater new hire productivity and 50% greater new hire retention. Companies with an engaging employee onboarding program retain 91% of their first year workers – Talentwise An Ineffective Talent Management Strategy Is Costly If you are not allocating budget to onboarding it is a pretty good guess that your talent management tools are not as effective as they could be overall. If you aren’t making the investment in tools, time, andRead More

How To Reinvent Your Retail Leadership Style

How To Reinvent Your Retail Leadership Style   In Retail there are so many reasons to reinvent yourself. Whether it’s because you feel you need an overall change or that your role has become a little stagnant and you need a boost. Maybe you feel like you have been losing momentum with your team or you have started recognizing that you have been taking their actions and/or results for granted. We all have a frequent opportunity to take a step back and assess our style, infuse some energy, and make adjustments to maximize the impact of our leadership and how it effects our personal/professional happiness and the professional happiness of those around us. Maybe we have been in our role for a fewRead More

How To Energize Your Retail Team

How To Energize Your Retail Team As Retail Leaders, we have all been there – knowing that we are at a point in a project or process where our team has lost it’s momentum, enthusiasm, and direction. The general mood is not negative…it’s just…blah. Bring The Energy Back To Your Team Here are some ideas on how to bring energy back to the business and rally the team around regrouping and conquering the project when the pace slows down: Give the project a fun and inspiring name – if the project to be done is somewhat dull and uninspiring, the action to complete it will be as well.  Get the team to think of titles for the process that generate some excitement andRead More

Understanding & Managing “Upward Delegation”

Understanding & Managing “Upward Delegation” For as many years as I can remember – even starting out at the beginning of my retail career – I have been confused by the sheer volume of calls that employees make to their Store Manager, to their District Manager about the smallest, least important, and non-urgent matters. Something that I experienced as a Store Manager [and quickly fixed] and something I still see Store Directors and Department Heads struggle with. I have always been able to speak to this behavior but had no clue it had a name until, literally, three days ago [where have I been?]. But…here you have it…Upward Delegation it is. So, What is “Upward Delegation”? To deal with an evolving and complexRead More

Workplace Romance In Retail

Workplace Romance In Retail Since we have a longer February and we are only 20 days away from spring when love is in the air and due to the fact that I have been writing about heavier topics this week and working on very serious projects I wanted to share some interesting and fun statistics on workplace romance for my lighthearted topic this week. With shows like MadMen and movies like Sur Mes Levres, Someone Like You, and Bridget Jones’ Diary [the first one…the second one was rubbish], it’s tough not to get a little caught up in the idea of a steamy and exciting [and a little bit risky] workplace affair/romance. I mean, c’mon…Jon Hamm/Don Draper…the way he wears a suit, thatRead More

The Art of Effective Delegation in Retail [And Why It’s Important]

The Art of Effective Delegation in Retail [And Why It’s Important] “Only 30% of managers think they can delegate well … and only one in three is considered a good delegator by his or her subordinates. This means only 1 in 10 managers really know how to empower subordinates“ – John Hunt, London Business School Professor and Financial Times columnist One of the biggest opportunity areas that I have been able to see consistently in my eons in retail is in developing effective delegation techniques in emerging leaders in the business. Delegation is an extremely valuable competency to possess as it effects three critical areas of effective leadership, efficiency, team member development and organizational sustainability. Doug Fleener, author of The Profitable Retailer: 56Read More

15 Traits of A “Terrible” Retail Leader

15 Traits of A “Terrible” Retail Leader According to Monster – 38% of employees rate their leader as “horrible” – In the past week I have referenced this statistic three times, that is how important and valuable I think it is to recognize – and for those of us who are lucky enough to be leaders in our industry –  to marinade in and digest. It is also likely to be what is the reality for us, as “Retail Leaders”. Success surveyed members of the Young Entrepreneurs Council to identify what qualities make for a terrible leader. Here was their response: Lack of Transparency: Your team can tell when you are not being honest. Lack of transparency = Lack of Trust. There isRead More

Stop Tolerating Bad Retail Employees (That Means Leaders, Too!)

Stop Tolerating Bad Retail Employees (That Means Leaders Too)! There are two completely frustrating truths in the retail industry that have always been a little bit of an irritant: Some retail organizations still believe that length of employment is a legitimate reason to promote someone in lieu of readiness or talent or ability [another topic for another day]; Retail organizations tend to hold onto toxic employees and take a hand’s-off approach and use hope as a strategy that the people will fix themselves. First, hope is not a strategy…it can never be a strategy unless you are determined to fail. But there has always been an approach that the organization has taken that shows fear as it relates to actually cutting ties withRead More

The Many Faces Of Retail Leadership

The Many Faces Of Retail Leadership “Mature leaders see individual differences as fuel for development, not as barriers to success. – Mike Myatt” Warning…This topic is dizzying [and long]! As I mentioned the other day, according to Monster, 38% of employees rate their leader as “horrible” while only 17% rate their leader as “excellent”. Clearly, something has gone wrong with “leadership” and what the function is. The other day I wrote an article titled, “Invested, Involved, And Interested Retail Leadership Is Important – Here’s Why…“. In that article I referenced some more truly surprising statistics about leaders and how they are perceived by their team members.  While I could go on and on about where leadership goes wrong and why our employees seeRead More

Why And How Success Is So Seductive

Why and How Success Is So Seductive “It’s seductive to believe that success comes from genius, it’s a pity that it is seldom so.” After reading an article the other day on Huffington Post Business about the “Seductiveness of Success” my interest in the subject was piqued. I decided to dig in a deeper to find a bit more on the topic and what makes those we consider true successes tick and what the pitfalls may be as those of us who seek to create a truly successful personal and professional brand will face as we navigate our way through the path to total world domination to leave our marks. Every day we are competing with many other personalities in the workplace forRead More

How To Be An Influencer In The Retail Workplace

How To Be An Influencer In The Retail Workplace This weekend I am taking my children on a quick vacation for my oldest’s 9th birthday. It’s going to be a exciting and fun long weekend for them, but I did buy tickets for us to see the Van Gogh Bedroom’s Exhibit at the Art Institute of Chicago on Saturday. Now, if I blurted out to my boys we were heading to an art museum for a few hours of the vacation they would moan and grumble about it. So, for the past two weeks I have been using influence to share the benefits and history of seeing this amazing exhibit and drawing on our past experiences seeing the works of Van Gogh andRead More

Invested, Involved, And Interested Retail Leadership Is Important – Here’s Why…

Invested, Involved, And Interested Retail Leadership Is Important – Here’s Why… Strategy Executive Company Root conducted a survey of workplace employees and found some pretty shocking perceptions that employee have of their organizations leaders: Many workers seem to doubt the ability of leaders to make workplaces run smoothly, drive accountability, and inspire risk-taking. 43% of employees believe that individual employees, not leaders, have the biggest impact on a company’s culture; This disconnect between employees and leadership might be because 68% of workers feel that most of their company’s leaders are better at their own jobs than inspiring others to excel; Only 22% of workers feel that upper management truly has the best interests of most of their employees at heart; Only 48% ofRead More

How The Very Best Retail Leaders Empower Their Employees

How The Very Best Retail Leaders Empower Their Employees Empowerment – it’s a term that we hear a lot in retail but the actual meaning is a little fuzzy. I went in search of a clarifying definition here is one I found – from Christine Chartrand at Atman Co., “Employee empowerment is the process of giving employees a certain amount of independence and responsibility to analyze, control, and make decisions with regards to specific tasks or projects. It means inspiring and motivating and enabling employees to think for themselves and have unique views on certain projects or issues, as well as allow for a degree of autonomy so they can take initiative and ownership.” “People want guidance, not rhetoric; they need to knowRead More

How Great Retail Leaders Motivate

Jack Zenger and Joe Folkman wrote “The Extraordinary Leader,” they discovered that there were five “fatal flaws” that leaders must avoid or change in their behavior and attitude in order to be approachable and effective in their role with their team: Inability to learn from mistakes Lack of core interpersonal skills and competencies Lack of openness to new or different ideas Lack of accountability and excessive defensiveness and Lack of initiative. None of these are surprising. When leaders are defensive and don’t behave in a responsible [or adult] way – it is a huge turn off to their team members. There is no respect, no trust, and absolutely no way your team will be open enough to learn anything from you. We knowRead More