DMSRetail

Yesterday, we started a conversation about getting too many emails that aren’t relevant to your business which just means you spend a lot of time pressing the delete key.

But, as many of you agreed, every so often you get an email that gives you food for thought, or a little piece of advice that really hits home and actually gives you some help with something that you may have been struggling with for a while.

Of course, not everything will be equally helpful to each of you because we have a lot of subscribers…from every level and type of retail management.

In any case, we all have the same goal in mind…to grow our retail business; make sure that same store, or comp store, sales and profits increase and that expenses are under control.

Improving and moving forward is a must, not an option. And, as we discussed yesterday, it’s tough to keep the forward momentum going, year after year, without getting some new ideas, advice, practical tips and how-to’s.

Things are always changing and we need to be on our toes all the time.

We want to help you with that forward momentum. We want to accompany each of you on that journey. DMSRetail has a wealth of information you can use, right now, to ensure your business is flying and not dying!

Today’s installment is about sharing information within the organization, and coaching…which just happen to go hand in hand.

Coaching and Information Sharing 

Highly successful Retail Managers excel at, and believe strongly in, information sharing. It is part of the management style we discussed earlier.

They stress that sharing information, continuously, is the best way to coach people. Of course, sometimes the coaching has to be more formal with time set aside for conversations on particular subjects. But, for the most part, they find that their general style of sharing information doubles as coaching.

Using every conversation to coach your people has a remarkable effect. Employees are picking up information as you speak and they can determine, for themselves, if this is something that they can use for their own betterment. Remember, highly successful Retail Managers have high quality people working for them and those individuals have been given a lot of autonomy so they often know what they need to pick up from a conversation. If the Manager doubts that the information is being understood properly then they can be more specific.

It is not always necessary to point out a deficiency if an information sharing conversation will have a more positive effect. It works.

The key word is share. Information is a great thing to share. All of us need information in order to perform well. The more information we get, within reason, the better we are able to perform.

If you do not share non-confidential information it may be because you are concerned that:

1. The employees cannot handle the information. You could be correct about this, depending on the situation. Perhaps the employee is new or there is some other reason but you need to take it upon yourself to make sure that, at some point, the employees can handle the information you have to share.

2. The employees may end up knowing too much. Take the approach that they can never know too much if it helps them do their job and look after the best interests of the company. A highly successful Retail Manager is confident that sharing non-confidential information is not going to jeopardize their position. Surrounding themselves with employees who have extensive knowledge and information is what they strive for. If the employees happen to know more than the Manager, so much the better! Maybe you can learn something from them, too.

3. You don’t want to take the time – the great deal of time you must invest – to share. If this is the case, you cannot be successful. Keeping information to yourself simply increases your workload and stress level and does nothing to further the cause or develop employees.

Sometimes we need to talk with an associate to tell them what we have observed and how they might be able to do better next time.

Taking a positive approach yields more positive results.

Remember, coaching is something that never stops, no matter how good your team gets. Only your approach should change; being mindful of their status and ability.World Champion athletes who are at their peak performance levels didn’t get there without a coach. And they can’t hope to stay in the game for long without their coach’s help.

We hope you found this email helpful in some way. You’ll find these coaching tips and much, much more in our Ultimate Retail Success Collection and you can check it out here.

Stay tuned for tomorrow’s installment.