There are many habits that all great managers believe and practice. I would like to start off with the three basic principles that I will talk about in this blog. Out of all the good habits that great managers practice, there are many more bad habits that a majority of the managers out there use instead. They don't realize that they are even practicing bad habits, which is why those habits are so hard to break. All that they are doing is simply doing the things that a manager of their past did to them at one of their prior jobs and they thought that those were the practices of a good manager. I am going to give you a short story that we are going to break down and find a few of the many bad habits as well as the things that should have been done differently.
Renee manages a retail store just inside a busy area of downtown. Her staff consists of herself, an assistant manager, a shift manager, and 4 sales associates. The sales associates have been there for a couple of years, but there is high turnover at the management level. She has been struggling with meeting sales goals for the last 4 months. She has hard working employees who show up on time and are dedicated. They do everything that she asks them to do but it seems like no matter what, they fall short month after month. Renee is frustrated with the lack of performance and knows that things have to change and they have to change fast! She simply can not afford to go through another quarter with poor performance. Renee makes a decision to replace her assistant manager and shift manager. The two managers that she replaces them with seem to be bright people who are also dedicated and do everything that she tells them to do. Renee spends a lot of time telling her employees everything that they need to be doing and barking demands. Her staff are made up of dedicated employees that love the store and love their customers. They are very close with them and the last thing that they want to do is lose their job. Production picks up a slightly over the next quarter as Renee's store hits sales goals 2 out of 4 months. The next quarter they miss their sales goals, so she fires and hires, and the wash, rinse and repeat cycle is in full effect.
Does this sound familiar? If you had $100 for every time you experienced this or knew of somebody that experienced this, how much money would you have??....... $1,000??....... more?? This is something that I think we are all too familiar with. It seems like something that is so far out there but when you think about all of your past career paths, it's not nearly as far out there as you might think.
Let’s look at what Renee did and didn't do. Her store hit sales goals about 1/4 of the time meaning the store was capable of hitting its goals. When things started to go south she was quick to replace the management that she had, even though her staff would listen to her and do everything she asked of them. Is it possible that the months that she hit sales goals, was only because her remaining staff was executing out of fear of losing their job? Notice that even though her staff was willing to listen to her, her tactics did nothing to improve the numbers. Which brings me to the first of the three basic principles that a great manager lives by.
1. Bad managers tell, Good managers listen.
Renee spent so much time telling her staff what they needed to be doing that she never took the time to see where the real problem was in the first place. Because her employees were working out of fear they were afraid to express any of their concerns to her. What would have happened if she would have spent more time listening to the conversations that her team was having with the customers?
An old wise man once told me, there is a reason that we have two ears and one mouth. So that we can listen twice as much as we speak.
Listening is the best way to figure out what's working and what isn't in an organization. If Renee would have spent more time listening to the conversations, she could have recognized that because her sales associates were so comfortable with the customers that they got relaxed and stopped attempting to drive business. She missed a coaching opportunity! The customers that you are the closest with are the best advocates you have to hitting your sales goals. Their defense wall has already been broken down and they are going to be much more susceptible to a finely tuned sales pitch. Her staff only did the little things when they felt that their jobs were on the line. They started pointing out the clearance section and letting the customer's know about the current promotion that they had going on. She could have listened to the conversation and had a talk with them about what they did right and what they could have done differently. Which brings me to the next basic principle.
2. Don't "blanket solution" focus on what they are doing right.
Renee was one of those managers that wanted all of her staff to do the same thing. Many of you may have been hit by a blanket solution in a past career and didn't even know it. A blanket solution is when a small majority of your staff are practicing bad habits that the business could do without. So management gives everybody the same solution with the same consequence to make sure that the problem doesn't persist. The problem with this is that the top performers are not deserving of this negative solution because they were never doing the wrong thing in the first place. They feel undervalued and stop going above and beyond, which is why they are your top performers in the first place. The staff that is guilty of practicing these bad habits, stop and pick up production slightly, but the ceiling on their improvement is still low, because they too feel like they are undervalued. So the bottom performers improve and your top performers recess and everybody meets like a big happy family right in the middle. Nobody does bad and nobody does good. Sometimes you hit your goals and sometimes you don't.
Top performers need to be treated like top performers. Sometimes a top performer main root of motivation is to be set apart from the bottom performers. Top performers need to feel valued and appreciated. Too often managers like Renee try to catch their employees doing something wrong instead of doing something right. Letting your top performers know their worth can be detrimental to the success of an organization. Energy is contagious in any organization, good or bad. By celebrating the successes of your top performers, their focus may become contagious and help bring the bottom performers up. Renee could have turned things around if she would have just simply managed to everybody competency level. The key is to keep your top performers performing at their peak and raise the level of your bottom performers to the middle because that is the next threshold of success. From there you can work with them on moving up to the next level. Never try to get your bottom performers to focus on the elite because they are not there yet and it will only discourage them.
Business is ever changing. There are always going to be things that you can't control but can worry about. Changes to policy, promotions and structural changes are the most common. Those are things that are completely out of your control unless you are the head of the company. Control what you can see, don't see what you can control. Which brings me to the 3rd and the most valuable step of all.
3. Invest in people first
The only thing that you have control over is the development of your people. Understand that there are many different personality types that are dealt with both at a corporate and at a consumer level. Every different personality type has strengths and weaknesses. When evaluating a team you should always look at it from a strength/weakness standpoint. Not by ones individual personality. By recognizing ones strengths you will know how to compliment them. By knowing their weakness you will know how to guide and develop them. Never be afraid to share what you know and help out those around you. A great manager always works to develop and promote those around him or her because that is what management is all about. When you hire, you should hire someone that has the potential for the next level in the near future. For example, when you need to fill an assistant manager, you hire somebody who possesses store manager qualities but are willing to take the pay of an assistant manager. When you hire a store manager they should possess the strengths of a general manager. When you hire a general manager they should possess the strengths of a corporate level manager, so on and so forth. A good manager should never ever hold someone back from developing to the next level. Investing in your people is the best thing that you will ever do in management. It is also the most challenging. It is much easier to fall to bad habits because often times you will find that’s what you may be surrounded with. But once you start to turn those bad habits around and develop good habits in people, you will find that you can take a group of 40 people and have everybody focused on the same goal, even though they are all focused on different tasks because you have successfully managed them to their core competency level. And that is what a good manager does. A good manager invests in people first.
No comments:
Post a Comment