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Category: Staff Training

Robots Replacing Workers

I’ve been following the minimum wage hike debate for years. As a store owner, minimum wage had a direct impact on our bottom line. I never wanted to pay minimum wage to my team because I never expected minimum work. Yet, in retail, there are only so many dollars to go around. Add more to the payroll and you have to subtract from somewhere else, or grow your business enough to cover the added expense.

One of the arguments often used by those opposed to minimum wage hikes is that it would lead to more automation. I can envision that reality in big corporate chains for two reasons. The first is that many retail corporations don’t do anything to train their employees to maximum effectiveness. The second is that these same corporations also don’t value their employees or expect anything out of them. (Does anyone see the vicious downward cycle in this thought process?)

Robot scanning shelves in a Walmart pharmacy
Picture from Walmart’s blog

The reality of automation is coming to a Walmart near you. Walmart is testing robots in select stores in Arkansas, California, and Pennsylvania to help scan and stock shelves.

Jeremy King, chief technology officer for Walmart U.S. and e-commerce, said that the robots were 50% more productive than their human counterparts but would not replace workers or impact worker headcount.

Are you buying that? Do you really think Walmart is going to invest in robots that are 50% more productive and still pay all the displaced workers at the same time?

Automation is coming to the big stores and it will have a huge effect on their bottom line. First, they get a tax break for investing in capital infrastructure. Second, they get to replace less-efficient employees with robots who have no restrictions on hours worked, overtime, vacation pay, healthcare, etc. That’s a win-win for them.

It can also be a win for you. The more they automate, the more you differentiate. Automation is designed to give a consistent, expected, reliable outcome. It isn’t designed to surprise and delight. (Then again, neither is an untrained team, like what the big corporations are using now.)

Our payroll at Toy House was not only a higher percentage than any of our competitors, it was higher than most independent toy stores. Why?

Amazing customer service from a well-trained staff is the best, most effective form of advertising and marketing you could ever conceive.

What’s more powerful? Me telling you on the radio to shop at Toy House or your best friend telling you why she likes shopping at Toy House? What’s more persuasive? Me on a billboard on your drive home or your co-worker saying you should visit Toy House?

You don’t have the resources to invest in robots like Walmart does. But you do have the resources to invest in training for your staff. You do have the resources to pay your staff more (and expect more out of them in return). You do have the resources to make your customers’ experiences so wonderful they have to tell their friends. Call it your advertising budget if you want. But put your money into your staff. That’s where your ROI will be highest.

Investing in your team will always beat automation and minimum wage hikes. Always.

-Phil Wrzesinski
www.PhilsForum.com

PS Not sure how to raise the bar on your customer service to the point that people talk? Here are two free resources from my website:

Use those as a starting point for crafting your own training program.

If you need more, I can suggest a few good people to come in and work with you and your staff, including one guy who used to run a pretty cool toy store with a huge payroll.

Sizeable Chunks, Trust, and Playing Guitar

In a couple nights I take the stage again at The Poison Frog Brewery with my guitar and harps to have a little fun. I’m playing at least once a month and having the time of my life. (I think the audience is enjoying it, too. Of course, the more you drink, the better I sound.) To keep the show fresh I try to learn a few new songs before every gig.

Some songs come easy and I pick them up right away. Others take a little time. In the back of my songbook I keep a few “works-in-progress” that I might try out toward the end of the night and see how well they work from the stage.

I was thinking about that while rehearsing last night. I have a few songs I love to play in the current set that spent a couple months in the back of the songbook. I just had to break those songs down into sizeable chunks to learn them a little bit at a time.

I learn new songs the same way I taught new skills—in sizeable chunks, one leading to another, where the whole was greater than the sum of their parts.

I was interviewing recently for a position as a Corporate Trainer and the interviewer asked me how I would facilitate teaching Trust. I told her that Trust cannot happen in a group until you first have built up Communication, Cooperation, and Caring. That is true in Team Building. It is also true in Sales.

As we have discussed, Relational Customers are looking for someone they can Trust. You garner Trust by first being able to build a relationship with the customer. You do that through communication, cooperation and caring.

I spent most of one year of staff training working primarily on Communication skills. We discussed how to approach a customer, how to create rapport, how to ask questions, and how to listen better to the answers. Each monthly meeting was a different topic on Communication.

I spent another year working more on Cooperation. We talked about how customers have needs, how our job was to discover those needs and fulfill them. We discussed how to solve problems the best way. We discussed how to meet the customer where she was at and let her guide the way as much as possible. Our job wasn’t to sell her as much as it was to serve her.

For Caring we talked about looking at the whole process through the customers eyes and making sure her needs were met first. We talked about empathy, what it was and how we show it. We talked about “completing the sale”—making sure the customer had everything she would possibly need to solve whatever problem she was solving—because if we didn’t do that, we would have failed meeting her needs. We talked about benefits of the product being more important than just the features.

Each meeting was a subset of the broader topic. Each broad topic was a stepping stone to the bigger picture of building Trust.

Trust takes time to build. You cannot just jump right in and get people to trust you. On the easy stuff, maybe (three chords and the truth), but to really develop the level of Trust that turns a customer into a lifelong fan it takes time, patience, practice, and prescribed steps to get there. It also only takes seconds for your untrained staff to destroy it.

I have two nights before my next gig. I’ll be practicing. I have two new songs that just got moved from the back of the songbook to the front, four more that were easy enough to learn quickly, and two new ones that are now in the back of the songbook. Should be a fun night.

-Phil Wrzesinski
www.PhilsForum.com

PS If you didn’t get that this was a post about creating a comprehensive Training Program, go back and read this again. I planned every individual training around three things, my short-term goal (learn how to listen better), my long-term goal (build up communication skills), and my ultimate goal (learn how to build trust with our customers). Rome wasn’t built in a day. Break the harder stuff down into sizeable chunks and you’ll find the training sticks better.

PPS How do I get seasonal people up to speed if my overall training takes years? Good question. With my seasonal staff I simply work on eliminating the things that destroy trust like saying, “I don’t know,” instead of “Let me find out.” Eliminate the bad stuff now and then we can replace it with more of the good stuff going forward.

When “Experience” Counts

We didn’t have a hierarchical structure at Toy House. While my dad was still there I did have the mantle of Vice President, but that was mostly to satisfy corporate rules. We didn’t have a manager or assistant managers or department heads. The closest thing we had to any kind of structure were the “key” employees—informally named because they had the keys to the building. They had the final say when I wasn’t in the building.

In my last group of key employees, none of them were hired because of their retail experience. They came from a wide variety of backgrounds and brought interesting skills to the table, but only one of them had worked in a similar environment (and she was hired because of skills she had shown in other non-retail jobs).

Yet there they were as my confidants, the inner circle of people I trusted the most with the safety and security of my retail business. They all shared a few traits such as the ability to stay calm in stressful situations, the ability to look at problems from the vantage point of what would be best for the customer and for the store’s reputation long term, and the ability to take charge of a situation if needed.

None of those traits are taught in typical retail training programs.

You are about to hire your seasonal team to help you get through the holidays. You already feel the crunch of the busy season. You worry if you will have the time to properly train your new seasonal staff well enough to serve your customers at the level they expect. Because of your fears and worries you make the single biggest mistake most retailers make in their hiring process.

You put too much emphasis on having “retail experience.”

Your thought process is that the more retail experience they have, the less training you need to do. I found out the hard way just how wrong that thought process really is.

First, understand that most other retailers don’t have a training program in place for their front line staff. They teach you how to clock in. They teach you how to read the schedule. They teach you how to run the register (if that’s part of your job). But the rest you pretty much have to pick up on your own. Therefore someone can have years of retail experience and still be lousy at it.

Second, recognize that your customers have a higher expectation from you and your staff than they do from most other retailers. So even if a new employee did get some modicum of training, it might not be anywhere close to the level you want them to have. Therefore all that “experience” ends up being a detriment, and you spend more time breaking bad habits than you do installing good habits.

The only “experience” that counts is their experience that shows they have the character traits you need. 

  • Do you want someone to be helpful? Find someone with experience being helpful and see whether they thrived in that position, regardless of where they worked.
  • Do you want someone to be a quick learner? Find someone with experience having to learn things quickly and see how well they did. (Did they grow in position and get promoted or stay stuck in one spot?)
  • Do you want someone who can solve problems? Find someone with experience doing a job that had problems needing to be solved and see how they did.
  • Do you want someone to be able to motivate others? Find someone with experience motivating others and see how well they did.

When I finally learned the lesson to stop hiring just because they had “retail experience” and started focusing on hiring for character traits, I found that my new hires without retail experience were often my best employees. They brought fresh, new perspective to the role while having the personality to meet my customers’ needs. Plus, I spent less time breaking them of their bad habits.

I know it is counter-intuitive. Heck, I read several books on hiring that echoed the sentiment of Harvard Business Essential’s book Hiring and Keeping the Best People that said, “The number one factor is experience on the job.” 

I beg to differ.

Experience counts. But it is the quality of experience, not the location of the experience that makes the difference. In retail, in management, in jobs where people skills trump specialized training, personality traits are far more important than having done a similar job somewhere else. 

-Phil Wrzesinski
www.PhilsForum.com

PS If you’re hiring high school and college-aged kids, they often won’t have any retail experience. Their academic and extra-curricular careers, however, tell you a lot about their personality and whether they have the traits to be successful on the job.

PPS Since I couldn’t find any books teaching what I found worked best for hiring and training, I wrote my own book—Hiring and the Potter’s Wheel: Turning Your Staff Into a Work of Art. When you want your team to be considered “beautiful, useful, strong, and long-lasting” you’ll pick up this book.

The Aha Moment (Or the Simplest Business Success Formula Ever!)

I’ve been looking at different job titles and job descriptions lately. The two that seem to grab my attention the most are the Marketing & Advertising jobs and the Managing People jobs. At first glance I figured I was drawn to those because those were two of my favorite things to do at Toy House.

Another thought hit me this morning on my drive home from dropping my son off at school.

Those two different jobs are really the same thing. Stop and think about it.

  • Awesome Customer Service is about figuring out your customer’s expectations and then exceeding them with surprise and delight.
  • Top-Level Selling is about figuring out your customer’s needs and then fulfilling them better than she expected.
  • Powerful Advertising is about figuring out your customer’s desires and then offering a solution better than she expected.
  • Amazing Events are about figuring out what your customer likes and then offering her more than she expects when she attends.
  • Incredible Managing is about figuring out what tools your team needs to be successful and then giving them better tools that take them beyond what they thought was possible.

It’s all the same thing.

  1. Figure out what she desires, needs, and expects.
  2. Give her more than she desires, needs, and expects.

That is the formula for a successful retail business. That is the formula for a successful service company. That is the formula for successful manufacturer. That is the formula for a successful advertising campaign. That is the formula for successfully managing your team. That is the formula for being successful as an employee.

The first part requires research. The first part is about studying human nature, watching market trends, thinking like a customer. The first part is about asking questions, listening, and analyzing what you hear. The first part is about testing and clarifying and testing some more. You’ll get it right some times and you’ll get it wrong some times. The better you do your research, the more often you will get it right.

The second part is about having that character trait in you that wants to help others. When you hire and train your team, look specifically for that trait and you’ll find the second part of the formula becomes second nature to your company. Your team will already want to give. You just have to show them what to give.

-Phil Wrzesinski
www.PhilsForum.com

PS An employee that figures out exactly what the boss wants and then gives the boss more than she wants will always have a meaningful job. A manager that equips her team with tools to make them better than they thought possible will always find people wanting to work for her. A marketer that can figure out the true desires of the customer base and speak to those desires will always move the needle. A salesperson who can figure out the exact problem a customer is trying to solve and then offer a solution better than she envisioned will always make more sales. A manufacturer who anticipates the needs of both the end user and the middleman and sets up a business to exceed both their expectations will find growth.

PPS I answered my own question. My Core Values include Helping Others and Education. I already have that character trait of giving (that’s why I write this blog and publish all the Free Resources). The Education side of me wants to do the research to figure out what to give.

The Best Way to Learn the Lesson

David M. Bailey, one of my favorite inspirational artists, wrote a song called The Hard Way with powerful lyrics …

They say the hard way is the only way we ever learn a thing
After everything I’ve learned I’d say they’re right
Sometimes it takes a thief to steal inside your house
Before you learn to lock your doors at night

I love the song, but will respectfully disagree with his premise that the hard way is the only way. I will grant him that the lessons do seem to stick better the hard way.

Like I said yesterday, we learn best from our failures. But even then, not everyone learns from their mistakes. Not everyone learns from their trials. Not everyone learns from their accomplishments, either. The reason we don’t learn is that most of us don’t have a process in place for turning a mistake, trial, or accomplishment into a lesson.

When I lead team building activities, I build in time for what is called “processing”—drawing out the lesson from each activity. I was taught a powerful tool decades ago for doing this, a tool I use time and time again to help me (and others) learn the lessons. The tool is three short, simple questions.

  • What?
  • So what?
  • Now what?
This guy is actually one of the smartest guys I know. His First Order of Business is one of the greatest business tools I have ever seen!

What? asks us to process exactly what happened during an activity, the concrete actions, the recap, the successes and failures, mistakes and triumphs of the activity. What happened? What went well? What didn’t? What was the outcome?

So what? is the abstract to the concrete, questions to draw out the lessons from what we did. So what did we learn from what we did? So what made the difference? So what would have made things different?

Now what? is the application of the abstract, the application of the lessons to future activities. Now what are we going to do with this information? Now what will we try to do going forward? Now what will happen when you run into this scenario again?

Here is an example from the team building activity with the canoes …

What?

What happened? We got on the water and found out that some people didn’t know how to canoe.
What did you do next? Knowing we couldn’t talk, I paddled my canoe over to the other canoe and tried to show them the proper way to hold a paddle and make a stroke.
Did it work? Eventually, but they still struggled.
Why did they struggle? Because with the limited communication I couldn’t teach them how to steer.
What eventually happened? They got it together through trial and error, but it took us a lot longer than expected and set us way behind schedule.

So what? 

So what was the real problem? We didn’t check to make sure people knew how to canoe when we picked this plan.
What else? Since we made assumptions that everyone could canoe, we didn’t think about training anyone for the task.
What about the communication?  It was a lot harder to communicate without words than we thought it would be, especially trying to teach a new skill.
So what would have made this better? If we had asked everyone if they knew how to canoe before they got into the boats and on the water.
What else could you have done? We could have done training on dry land while we had full use of communication and before we had to launch.
So what would have been the outcome if you did that? We would have saved time and been more skilled at completing the task.

Now what?

Now what are you going to do going forward? Make sure everyone has the right skills to complete a task before we start.
Anything else? Include a skills assessment so that we know what skills everyone has and what skills we need to add to our training program.
How will that help you? We’ll know our strengths better and be able to plan activities that utilize the skills the team already has.
How will you apply the lesson of communication? Make sure that when we need to train, we do it when we have the time and full resources to do it properly rather than on the job when we are limited.

The hard way is a powerful teacher, but the best way to get lessons to stick no matter how hard or easy is through a solid process.

What? So what? Now what? is as solid of a process there is.

-Phil Wrzesinski
www.PhilsForum.com

PS You may have noticed that all my blogs have a postscript or two. Go back and read a few and you will find they are most often the Now what? to the lesson of the post. Now what are you going to do? Practice using this technique when training your new employees, when dealing with an employee who screws up, and when recapping your staff trainings and meetings. You’ll find the lessons stick much better.

PPS The order of the questions is important. If you don’t first establish what happened (What?), you cannot pull out the lessons (So what?). If you don’t fully understand the lessons then you cannot apply them to future activities (Now what?). If your group is struggling with either the second or third step of this process, go back and reestablish the previous step.

PPPS This works with parenting as well.

Learning From the Mistakes of Others

As I was putting my resume together, I was thinking back on some of the Team Building activities I have created over the years. My favorite one was the Drainage Ditch Determination. That was 26 years ago. I wish I still had the original notes. I know we didn’t call it by that name but I cannot remember exactly what we called it. I do remember the activity and the lessons. I can take you back there in a heartbeat.

(Thump-thump)

That’s me holding the ropes on a rock climbing trip back in 1991

After a day of basic team building activities, the group was given a new challenge. A handful of canoes needed to be transported at dusk from one location to another. The only map available showed a lake and a drainage ditch that led from their current location to the destination (approx 2 miles). The map also showed hiking trails leading to the destination (approx 2 miles) but had the disclaimer that although the trails were well-defined, they were unmarked (and crisscrossed the region.)

The group was then split into four subsets.

  • Leadership. They got the final decision on what the group did.
  • Logistics and Planning. They were responsible for determining the options, presenting them to the Leadership group, and making sure everyone had what they needed to complete the task.
  • Communication. One of the rules of the activity is that there was no verbal communication on open water. This group had to plan out all communication and how it would be implemented including internally and externally.
  • Safety. They had veto power over all the other groups if ever they felt an activity was unsafe. They also had to set the parameters for safety such as wearing life jackets in the canoes, etc.

The challenge itself was fairly straightforward. The most obvious choice based on the information given was to paddle the canoes as far as possible and carry them the 40-50 yards necessary to the final destination. What the map didn’t make clear was the difficulties traversing the drainage ditch because it didn’t show the barbed wire fence or culvert obstacles to be overcome. What made it even more interesting is that the activity began at dusk. By the time the group reached the drainage ditch, it was fairly dark and only one flashlight was permitted.

You can probably see where this activity went. The first issue usually arose on the lake when members of the group realized some of them didn’t know how to paddle a canoe (and they had no verbal communication for giving on-the-spot instruction.) We had eye-opening conversations about the importance of making sure everyone has the basic skills necessary to complete a task and whether that was a leadership problem or a logistics problem.

Once in the drainage ditch, issues of safety, logistics, and decision making all came into play. On top of that, there was the issue of perseverance.

One group I facilitated got within ten feet of a split rail fence. Their destination was just on the other side of that fence, but because of major breakdowns in communication, concerns for safety (emotional and physical), and low morale, Leadership threw in the towel. We had a powerful talk about what to do when morale falters, and the importance of emotional safety. (Note: it was the right decision for them to quit when they did. In Team Building, completing the task is always secondary to safety and never necessary to learn the lessons.)

Even the groups that successfully completed the task had breakdowns along the way. It was in the failures that the best learning occurred.

We had discussions about how the division of powers, while fine on paper, tended to be fallacy in practice. Everyone had to be on board for safety. Everyone had to be on board with the logistics and plans. Everyone had to be on board with the communication. Leadership simply had to make sure everyone was on board. If someone didn’t understand or didn’t want to go along with the group, completing the activity was in jeopardy.

We had discussions about the importance of Leadership listening as much as leading. When Leadership didn’t listen to Safety or Logistics, that group was doomed to failure.

We had discussions about the importance of being able to stay calm and solve problems when unforeseen obstacles got in their way. Climbing out of a canoe in a drainage ditch to avoid a barbed wire fence in the dark was a challenge most people had never faced. One group mapped out a new policy for unforeseen obstacles for the next time they faced one on their real job (they were a group of Resident Advisors for a college dormitory.)

Back in 1991 my boss and I facilitated several groups through this activity that ranged from high school groups to the corporate leaders at Domino’s Pizza (including Tom Monaghan himself). I doubt the insurance companies would allow such activities any more.

Good thing you and I can still learn the lessons from the groups lucky enough to slog through that ditch.

“Learn from the mistakes of others. You can’t live long enough to make them all yourself.” -Eleanor Roosevelt/Groucho Marx/Sam Levinson (depending which quote site you prefer)

-Phil Wrzesinski
www.PhilsForum.com

PS One thing I have always found head-scratching in business is the knee-jerk reaction to immediately fire someone who screws up. Screw-ups happen. Wouldn’t it be better to keep the person who has already learned the lesson the hard way rather than hire a new person who hasn’t yet learned that same lesson? Just some food for thought.

PPS You might recognize the subset groups better by their corporate names

  • Leadership = Management
  • Logistics and Planning = Sales and HR
  • Communication = Marketing
  • Safety = Legal

Go back and plug those words into the post and see how those lessons become even more apparent.

Could This Happen in Your Store?

You have some time to kill before your next appointment. You pull into the parking lot of one of your favorite stores at 9:17am. You know they don’t open until 9:30am. It says so right on the door. That’s okay. You’ll sit and wait.

You look up from your phone to see someone walking into the store. You check your phone. Nope, still only 9:20am. Maybe she is an employee.

Image result for broken open signYou see another person walking out of the store with shopping bags in her arms. It’s only 9:21am. Three customers later, you’re wondering what is going on. Finally at 9:30am you walk in past the sign on the door that clearly says 9:30am to 9:00pm Monday through Saturday.

Once inside, you see plenty of customers already in the store shopping, but the two center rows of lights are off. Now you are really confused. You work your way toward the back of the store down one of the lit side aisles. You finally see a staff member near the back.

“I thought you opened at 9:30am”

“Not on Saturdays. We open at 10:30am on Saturdays. We never open at 9:30.”

“That’s not what your door says.”

“You need to read it again.”

“Then why are all these people in here already?”

“We’re having a special event.”

“Why are the lights off?”

“We aren’t open yet. I told you. We don’t open until 10:30am.”

You walk away from this employee with more questions than answers. A special event? Where are the signs? What kind of event? Why are the lights off? Why does the door say 9:30am? Why was she so rude?

You work your way carefully up one of the darkened aisles. You get to the front and walk to the door. It still says Monday through Saturday 9:30am to 9:00pm. No signs about special events anywhere.

You see another employee, a manager. You ask her the same questions. She confirms that the store normally opens at 9:30am. She confirms that they opened at 8:30am for a special event (even though you still haven’t seen any signs about it.) You ask her why the lights are off. She says, “Oh, I didn’t notice.”

Ten minutes later the lights come on. You look at your phone. 10:00am on the dot.

A few minutes later you walk out of the store empty handed, shaking your head, confused. One of your favorite stores has dropped a few notches on your list. You still don’t know what the special event was. You still don’t know how the manager couldn’t notice that half the aisles were too dark to shop. You still don’t know why the one employee was so adamant they don’t keep the hours they have posted on their front door.

About the only thing you can do is call your friend who writes a blog about retail. I took that call about 12:20pm today. I’m still not sure how to file this or even what lesson to learn from it.

Tom Clancy said, “The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense.” This story makes no sense at all. That’s how you know it is true.

Is this about holding a special event and not making a big deal about it with signage, lights, and everyone on board?

Is this about an employee not knowing basics like the store hours and not knowing how to treat a customer with respect?

Is this about a manager not observant enough to know the lights aren’t on?

Or is this simply a cautionary tale that if you aren’t taking care of the details, you just might be turning off customers who otherwise liked you?

I’ll let you decide the lesson.

-Phil Wrzesinski
www.PhilsForum.com

PS The unfortunate thing is that this is becoming the norm in retail. While that helps you differentiate yourself from your competitors, it also lowers the overall bar of expectation making it easier for your competitors to meet those lower expectations. It devalues customer service as a whole, and that is not good.

Where to Spend the First Million

Reports are that Toys R Us has secured $3.1 billion in financing to get them through the holiday season. Thanksgiving is only nine weeks away. I have a plan for the first million dollars they should spend that will change the culture in their stores immediately and just in time for the critical holiday season. It will take about seven weeks to fully implement. Have David Brandon call me ASAP.

There are 866 Toys R Us and Babies R Us locations in the United States. I would fly the 866 store managers in to headquarters for a full day of training. That training would include a morning segment and an afternoon segment.

The morning segment would be all about toys and play value including:

  • The Importance of Play Value on Child Development
  • The Elements of a Great Toy
  • The Different Ways Children Play
  • Smart Toy Shopping

The afternoon segment would be all about hiring and training a staff plus how to raise the bar of customer service and would include:

  • Determining the Character Traits for the different positions on the team
  • Interviewing Techniques
  • Developing a Training program for New Hires
  • Developing a Continual Training Program for current staff
  • Raising the Bar on Customer Service

The morning would be about changing the way the company as a whole looks at the products they sell and gets them to shift their mindset away from “selling toys” to “solving problems” or “helping children develop.” As I explained previously, this is the direction they should have taken back in 1998 when Walmart surpassed them in overall toy sales. This is where they should have gone to reclaim their throne as the “king of toys.”

The afternoon would focus on raising the bar for the staff by finding better people, training them better, and creating a lasting program to continually raise the bar on their servicing of their customers. Even a big chain like Toys R Us that doesn’t offer a lot of fancy services like free gift wrapping or year-round layaway can still find new and better ways to treat customers by meeting and exceeding their expectations.

The managers would end the day equipped with new skills for hiring, training, and managing their staff while also teaching their staff and their customer base about the importance of their products and why customers should be choosing to shop at Toys R Us for all their toy needs.

Not only would Toys R Us see a profound shift in customer satisfaction this holiday season, but with better hiring of the seasonal staff, the managers would have a better pool of employees to change the culture of their stores going forward. Better hiring skills have a cumulative effect year after year.

The cost to TRU breaks down like this …

  • 866 managers flown in for training x $800 per person for flight and hotel = $692,000
  • Assorted costs for training room, lunches, and printed materials = $58,000
  • Fee for me to do 7 weeks of training (at 25 managers a day, it would take 35 days to see them all, or seven 5-day weeks) = $250,000

It would be the best million dollars they spend all year. But they better hurry. Thanksgiving is only nine weeks away.

-Phil Wrzesinski
www.PhilsForum.com

PS If you’re an independent retailer you’re hating this post. Everything I just explained that TRU should do is exactly what sets you apart from the category killer and big-box discounters you compete against. If you’re an indie retailer, though, you have secretly been scared that if the category killer in your industry ever “got it” and decided to do what I’ve outlined, it would make your job that much harder. Here’s the kicker. Do it first. Do it before they get smart.

PPS My rate may seem a little high, but that’s because I’m here to help my fellow indie retailers and small businesses succeed. If the chains want me, they’ll have to pay. You, however, can hire me to do all that for your business at fraction (very small fraction) of that cost. Get a couple of your fellow local retailers to join you and you can split it even further. Call me.

Working “On” Part 5 – Evaluating Progress

We all dreaded the blue sheets. As camp counselors at Storer Camps, we had to write up an “evaluation” of every camper in our cabin. The blue sheet was the worksheet we used. It had spaces for us to mark their daily activities and a few questions where we wrote short answers about their time at camp including what they seemed to like most, their strengths, and areas where they struggled.

The blue sheet dates back several decades. I remember my mom getting them from my counselors back in the 1970’s. I remember my own trials writing them late at night by flashlight on the porch of my cabin just to get them done on time. I remember turning them in to my director for approval only to be asked to rewrite them because of penmanship or to change a word or phrase. No time off until your blue sheets were finished and approved.

I also remember reading them as a parent and appreciating the thoughtfulness and insight that went into them. It made my boys’ camp experiences more meaningful. It gave me an outsider’s perspective of my children, a valuable measure of their growth.

Evaluations can be viewed as measuring sticks. They show you progress when you compare them to previous evaluations. They are also maps because they show you where you are in relation to where you want to go.

You are already using tools to evaluate your business. Your Profit & Loss and Balance Sheet are two of those tool. Your GMROI and Turn Ratio are also tools used to evaluate your business. These are easy tools because they measure hard, fast numbers.

If your Game Plan, however, is to exploit your Competitive Advantage of having better people offering better services, you have to have a map that shows you where your staff members are in relation to where you want them to go. You have to have a tool for evaluating their progress.

Some consultants believe in commission sales as the tool to evaluate your staff. If their numbers are going up, then life is good. The problem is that commission sales don’t always work in every type of retail store, nor are they truly an accurate predictor of someone’s selling skills since luck and timing and many other factors outside of pure selling skills have an effect on the numbers.

Some believe in written evaluations—blue sheets for your staff listing their strengths and areas they need to improve. I tried those and got frustrated by them. Although they measured, they didn’t map. Plus they took a long time to process and complete. They were as discouraging as they were encouraging. On top of that, if you don’t evaluate fairly and honestly without emotion using concrete, specific examples of problems needing to be fixed, these written reports could come back to bite you in a wrongful termination lawsuit.

Written evaluations are best for documenting unacceptable behavior to protect yourself in termination cases, but they don’t work as well for motivating your staff to improve.

Here are the concrete steps I suggest for mapping a path for your staff.

  • Talk to them. Sit down every so often and just have an informal conversation.
  • Ask questions. Ask them how they are doing. Ask them what they are working on. Ask them what they have learned from the training program (that I know you have implemented.) Ask them where they see themselves in the big picture of the store. Ask them if they understand their purpose for being employed. Ask, ask, ask.
  • Give them praise. Praise them for what they have done, what they have learned, and where they are. Roy H. Williams said, “What gets measured gets managed, but what gets measured and rewarded improves.” Praise is often enough of a reward to get the improvement you seek.
  • Offer suggestions. Based on your observations of their work, coupled with their own beliefs of where they are on their journey, give them suggestions for what they can “work on next” to reach the goals you have already spelled out for your team. Give them concrete action steps such as reading certain articles or books, or watching certain videos, or working on a specific task.

Do it informally and do it often. Formal evaluations are scary and make your team afraid of you. Because of the amount of work involved, they also happen too infrequently to be of good value. Informal discussions following the format above build trust and help motivate your team. Plus they give you a much quicker read on the talent and potential of your current players so that it is easier to spot new, better talent when it comes along.

Combine these conversations with a kick-ass continual training program and you will see the progress before your very eyes.

-Phil Wrzesinski
www.PhilsForum.com

PS There are many who might disagree with this procedure. There are valid arguments for a formal evaluation process. If you are a small business with only a handful of employees, however, a formal evaluation process could be (or at least feel) overwhelming. Your true goal for evaluating your staff is to see where they are and motivate them toward the ultimate goal of being the best at serving your customers. Daniel H. Pink in his book “Drive” points to three things that intrinsically motivate your staff—Autonomy, Mastery, and Purpose. A simple measuring stick of growth compared to where you were previously is Mastery, but a map of where you are in relation to where you want to go is Mastery and Purpose.

Working “On” Part 3 – Hiring a Manager

I’ve only been flown in for an interview once in my life. I went to the Catskills in New York to interview for a position running an experiential education and wilderness trip program. I was a perfect candidate for the job. Not only did I have the experience running a similar program in Michigan, this program also had a strong bike program and owned a fleet of several dozen bikes they had to maintain. I had spent my teenage years assembling and fixing bikes at Toy House. It was a perfect match!

I figured I had the inside track on this job. They flew me in so they must have thought quite highly of me. I had the perfect skill set. I also knew the other two candidates. Both were currently working in the program where I was interviewing. Both had previously worked for me. Neither had the experience in a managerial role I had.

Although I thought I interviewed well, I didn’t get the job.

Only later did I find out the guy doing the hiring had always and only promoted from within. He flew me in only because his boss demanded he interview someone outside the company. I didn’t have a chance. I never had a chance.

Hiring from within makes sense on the surface. You’re hiring a known quantity. You’re hiring someone who already knows your culture (and likely fits in). You’re hiring someone who already knows your procedures. You’re hiring someone who is already loyal to you. The risks seem low.

Laurence J. Peters published a management theory in 1969 about the promotion and hiring from within now called the Peter Principle. According to Wikipedia, the concept is “that the selection of a candidate for a position is based on the candidate’s performance in their current role, rather than on abilities relevant to the intended role. Thus, employees only stop being promoted once they can no longer perform effectively, and ‘managers rise to the level of their incompetence.’ “

The risks may seem low, but the downside to the Peter Principle is that you end up with incompetent people at every level of the organization because you elevate people until they are no longer competent. Does that sound like a good plan?

You need to hire your manager the same way you hire anyone at your company. Make a list of all the traits and skills necessary for a person to be successful on the job. Then figure out what you can teach your new manager and what that person needs to bring to the table.

When you make a list for a sales associate you get different traits than your list for a store manager. A perfect salesperson is great at selling. A perfect manager is great at teaching and motivating. Yes, one person can be good at both. But if you are promoting your best salesperson to manager just because they are your best salesperson, you might have made two positions on your team worse off.

Your manager is most important hire you will make. Your manager is the person who gives you the most time to work on your business instead of in it.

Here are concrete steps you can use to find a great manager.

  • Make a list of the skills needed to be a great manager. That list better include the ability to teach, the ability to motivate, and empathy. You probably need to throw trustworthy onto that list, too, and the ability to learn.
  • Make a list of questions you can use to identify those skills in your candidates. Here are some on ability to teach and trustworthiness. Tell me about a time where you had to teach someone else a new skill. How well did it go? What would you do differently if you could go back in time? Tell me about a time when you weren’t able to keep your word. How did you rectify that situation later?
  • Talk to your current staff, especially the high performers who are great in their current role, but not necessarily skilled for the next role. Many people feel the need to want to move up the ranks. Your best salespeople might feel resentment if you pass them over. Talk to them about the importance of their current role and why you need them in that position. If it about money, give them a raise. If they are truly your best salespeople, they are worth it. If it is about power, give them responsibilities that fit with their skill set. They feel better, you feel better, and you haven’t promoted anyone to the level of incompetence.
  • Move “industry knowledge” lower down your list. Sure it helps if someone is as enthusiastic about your niche in the market as you are. But it isn’t nearly as important as the ability to learn, the ability to teach, and the ability to motivate other people. Given the choice between hiring someone who can step in and lead the team while they learn the products or someone who knows the products but is still learning how to lead, you know the smarter choice.

Your goal is to get the most competent people into every position possible. The manager role is the most important of all those positions.

-Phil Wrzesinski
www.PhilsForum.com

PS I have seen the Peter Principle in almost every place I have worked. I have even been guilty of it a few times myself. It never seems to end well. The easiest way to prevent it from happening in your business is to look at each role as being a separate position requiring separate skills, not a benefit or reward for time served or a promotion for those who do best in their current role.

PPS My son wrote a college entrance essay on “Leadership”. He identified empathy as being the most important character trait of a great leader. I couldn’t argue with his premise at all. Hopefully he still has that essay saved somewhere so that I can use it in a future post.