Maximize Your Holiday Impact: Strengthening Retail Leadership from the Field to Store Support Centers

The clock is ticking on the holiday shopping season! With Thanksgiving falling on the very last Thursday of November this year, traditional retailers face an unusually tight window—just four weeks and four critical weekends—from Black Friday to Christmas Day. This year’s December 25th holds even greater significance, as it also marks the first night of Hanukkah. The result? A whirlwind month of in-store and online gift shopping, with the National Retail Federation (NRF) forecasting a 2.5%-4% sales increase, bringing U.S. holiday retail sales to an estimated $277 billion. Get ready for a fast-paced, high-stakes season with significant business impact opportunities for those retailers that can meet the moment.

This is also the time of the year that store operations asks the retail store support centers and distribution center teams to minimize extraneous communication, miscellaneous tasks, and special requests directed to the stores and field leaders. The goal is to make sure the field teams can focus on maximizing the season, leveraging the increase of traffic, and keeping associates motivated, engaged, and feeling appreciated for all their hard work during the hectic holiday season.

While the store associates are busy stocking shelves, working longer hours, and offering exceptional and expedient customer service as shopper traffic ramps up during the holiday season, the store support center and DC teams are winding down. With their focus on ensuring the best inventory levels, product assortment, and support to enable the stores to achieve a successful holiday season, most of their priority work starts in the summer and is done by Thanksgiving.

Building a Strong Retail Leadership Culture

When we launched MOHR Retail’s SSL Store Support Leadership training in 2012, it stemmed from research comparing the leadership dynamics of store support and distribution center teams with that of retail field leaders. We discovered that the core principles, skills, and strategies driving the success of our RSL (Retail Store Leadership) and RML (Retail Multiunit Leadership) programs were equally impactful for leadership teams across support centers and DCs, although there are a few key differences for leaders in these home office and distribution facilities. SSL reflects and addresses those findings, giving these teams leadership development that is grounded in the realities of the retail ecosystem, not just generic off-the-shelf or slightly customized leadership training.

Over the past 12 years more and more clients have implemented SSL (Store Support Leadership) to help establish a common language, behaviors, and skillset across their leadership ranks and build a more unified, productive culture. Some clients were already using our field leadership training, including RSL and RML, while others have initiated their implementations within the store support and DC teams first. In both cases, clients have told us this comprehensive, retail-focused approach is strengthening the leadership culture, building consistency, and helping drive results across the organization. It’s also enhancing succession by creating more opportunities for cross-training and promotions from the field to the DCs and store support centers and vice versa.

Leading in a Retail Store Support or Distribution Center

The biggest change we’re seeing today from when we created SSL is the fact that more corporate office leaders are now working remotely or adhering to hybrid work schedules rather than working out of a central home office or support center five days a week. While we’ve observed a return-to-office shift in retail organizations over the past year, the office environment hasn’t returned to 2012 realities where everyone had an office phone and central receptionists were commonplace. In many cases, that role has been replaced with more of a security function.

While we’ve found that distribution center leaders have still largely been required to work on-site five days a week, some retailers have allowed select DC leadership positions to have the flexibility to work from home two to three days a week.

Outside of that shift, the six major themes that emerged from our original field research as the key factors differentiating the role of the store support and DC leaders from that of retail field leadership remain the same:

1. Perform triple roles of “Do,” “Lead,” and “Influence”

Support leaders are busy. Not only are many of them working leaders (which means they have their own work to do in the department), they also oversee and are evaluated on their team’s productivity while concurrently serving as a business partner and advisor to other support departments and the stores.

This paradigm of working leader (do), supervisor (lead), and business partner (influence) exists throughout the distribution center and home office environments. The implications of having triple roles to play and play them well begin to manifest in a support leader’s challenge of juggling all three competently.

2. Develop technical skills more likely than interpersonal skills

Unlike the stores, where sales and service training is frequently a priority, soft skills training in support areas is rarely given the same priority as the technical training that immediately impacts safety or the processing of entire shipments of merchandise. Our research indicated that, in fact, sometimes interpersonal skills training isn’t done at all in support areas. Retailers often rely on the leader to have learned those skills through previous experiences.

3. Have specialized roles and responsibilities, which create silos

In order to maximize efficiency, retailers often intentionally narrow responsibilities in support areas. While this does create well-defined responsibilities with a much greater depth of skills, it also has a tendency to shape thinking into a “black or white,” “in policy or out of policy’” approach. If you’re trained on technical specifics and measured on technical specific outcomes, your world naturally begins to look and feel siloed, separated from other departments with their own procedures.

The rise of hybrid and virtual teams has exacerbated this siloed mentality while creating new challenges for getting the most from the power of collaboration and from individuals who may feel “forgotten” or disconnected from the culture. Gone are the watercooler brainstorming sessions or the opportunities to walk to and have lunch outside of the office together. These have traditionally been important ways to stoke creativity, solve problems, and think outside of the box vs. inside the office.

 4. Lead associates who often work independently

There is an assumption in support areas that you know what to do and you just need to do it. This impacts how frequently a leader checks in and provides feedback. When feedback is given, it may not be around the same time as the actual behavior being observed. Our research in support areas also showed a high degree of measurement on specific metrics. Since so much of the measurement is focused on the outcome (e.g., what we did, such as got the trucks out on time or designed a more welcoming store interior), there’s an assumption that the process that “got them there” works. This will limit innovation and improvement if the support leader doesn’t review the process as well as the results on a regular basis.

 5. Have broader exposure to wider range of people and teams

The proverbial “fishbowl” effect of working in or near the home office brings with it both good news and bad news. Our research strongly indicates that DC and home office leaders need to develop the skills that give them the ability to give and get feedback constructively, influence others, and come to the table with a point of view. The communication skills required to effectively influence, sell an idea, or communicate upwards are much more sophisticated and require unique strategies specific to those types of interactions.

6. Are successful as much for their leadership presence as their competence

Support leaders sometimes own the agenda of a meeting to which they are inviting either peers and/or more senior levels of authority. In these situations, they’re expected to lead and influence individuals or whole departments who do not directly report to them. As a result, it’s critical that they have strong interpersonal skills and are able to lead to maintain, if not strengthen, their reputation through these meetings and communications.

For more in-depth discussion of these six themes, be sure to download our updated research report into the role and into the responsibilities, competencies, and specific challenges faced by leaders who work in a retailer’s corporate offices or distribution centers. Please also feel free to contact us with your insights and with any questions.