Retail Leadership Training
Online vs. Instructor-Led Training: What Retailers Need to Consider
E-learning is an attractive option in retail, especially when you’re making the tough call about whether or not to take people off the floor and put them into a classroom for a training workshop. But depending on what kind of training you’re doing—and what kind of outcomes you need to achieve—the choice isn’t always so…
Read MoreHow Coaching in Real Time Raises Your Store’s Game
Today’s shoppers are more demanding and more educated about what they’re looking for than ever before. To keep up, retailers are constantly on the lookout for innovative ways to take the customer experience to a new level. But it takes more than data and technology to meet the demands of today’s customers. When shoppers are…
Read MoreRetail Store Support Leaders Face Unique Challenges
All leaders face a number of challenges that are simply common to the role of being a leader. But there are always some unique wrinkles faced by different leadership functions. The leaders and managers in the home office and distribution centers, for example, deal with some very different situations and issues than those who responsible for what’s happening…
Read MoreDefining Retail Leadership Presence
Just what is “leadership presence”? In their book, Leadership Presence, The Ariel Group’s founders Belle Linda Halpern and Kathy Lubar use real client stories from the company’s experience in working with leaders across industries to help define leadership presence. They put real meat on the bones of the elusive idea. One element that contributes to…
Read MorePreparing Store Leaders for the Retail Fall/Holiday Season
At the store level, execution during the fall/holiday season is everything. This means your store leaders have to be able to communicate the specifics and importance of what to focus on. They have to coach and reinforce sales and service behaviors. They have to be prepared to address their teams as soon as they see…
Read More4 Factors That Separate Great Retail Leaders from the Rest
The headline—15 Traits of a “Terrible” Retail Leader—is bound to get your attention. SUCCESS magazine recently surveyed members of the Young Entrepreneurs Council to find out what qualities terrible leaders seem to have in common. From dismissing ideas other than your own to having a poor communication strategy, the list runs the gamut of issues we…
Read MoreAre Your Managers Missing the Signals?
When we talk about motivation, we think of it as an outcome, not an input. If you’re a retail multiunit manager, one of the most effective ways to improve motivation is to help your team become more competent in how to do their job well. Based on our research, there are four factors that make…
Read MoreRetail Leadership Skills: Not Just for Leaders Any More
While the merits of Holacracy have been hotly debated (particularly in relation to Zappos’ high-profile pivot to a “peer-to-peer workplace”), most of the interest in management skills for non-managers that we’ve seen lately doesn’t involve this kind of extreme shift to a flat organization. Instead, it centers around the trend towards more highly collaborative and…
Read MoreMotivating Associates: 4 Store Leadership Best Practices
One of the primary aspects of the retail store manager’s role is helping associates maximize their own potential and performance. That’s why it’s so important for your leadership training to address the issues of associate engagement and motivation. Here are 4 leadership best practices from our research that will help unleash motivation to drive higher…
Read MoreDelegating: It’s More Than Moving Things Off Your To-Do List
Task assignments are most often a way of getting something done that needs to happen routinely. Delegation, on the other hand, means giving a person responsibility outside their current job with some degree of decision-making authority. When we teach our module in MSL (Merchant & Support Leadership) on Delegating to Develop, participants are sometimes confused. “You…
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