myRetailer.ca

The way you portray leadership qualities and instil confidence directly affects your employee’s performance

During good times and especially in bad, do you portray leadership qualities in your daily interactions with your staff? As leaders, we always have to conduct ourselves in a manner that instils confidence in the eyes of our team. Employees look to management for leadership during turbulent times. And in today’s economy this is more important than ever.

Okay, so you believe that you do instil confidence in the way you conduct yourself. Well, what about those little personality quarks or habits that come out when things aren’t going so well? Do you have a “tell”? That’s the poker term that used for habits of physical ticks that gives away someone’s hand when they’re trying to bluff. You may be wondering, what are some of these tells? (more…)

When you ensure your customers have everything they need before checking out, you’re doing them an enormous favour (not to mention in increasing your Average Ticket Size).

In our stores this spring, our entire team has been attending our spring training sessions. Recently, during a session, we had a great discussion about selling additional items to customers and how it was truly a service to them.

At my stores, our company purpose is to find solutions that provide enjoyment, relaxation and a sense of pride to our customers. Customer service is our number one value. Our staff knows that when we are serving a customer, we must always remember our purpose and do everything we can in order to ensure success for our customers. Most often, that means suggesting other items that will ensure that they are successful and get the most out of their purchase.

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How important is it to find and hire the best employees? Most Important.

Bradford Smart, author of Topgrading (the best book I’ve ever read on hiring), says to never hire an employee unless you are truly happy with how they interviewed and every single reference is glowing. Unless you’re 100% confident in your choice, he says that you should stay the course and keep searching. I have to say that I agree.

Recently I was hiring for an outside company sales position, a key position within our store. In our first round, we interviewed our top six candidates from the stack of resumes we had collected over two weeks, to no avail. After going through the interviews, both myself and my Managing Partner agreed that even though we had a couple of good candidates, the person we were looking for was not in that group, so we started over and kept looking. We simply refuse to settle for second best. I’d rather start over and continue the search, than settle for second best.

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Goal Setting for Team Members

Goal setting is an effective tool that encourages members of a team to strive for new heights – wherever they might reside in your organization.

Are you a goal setter? Do you encourage goal setting among your staff?

I encourage all of you to set 3-5 goals for the coming year and have your more senior staff do the same. Then have everyone share their goals with the team and meet monthly to track everyone’s progression on those goals. With complete transparency on everyone’s part, encourage teamwork and support among team members to help one another achieve their goals.

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360-Degree Feedback

Knowing what kind of boss you are and how employees rate you can be a touchy subject. A great tool for improving your management style and skills is to ask your team to perform a 360-degree review on you.

Twice a year, our company does performance evaluations on every employee, once in February and once in August.

During our winter reviews, we also have all of our senior managers reviewed by their direct reports, using 360-degree reviews.
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