Three Tips for New Leaders

By: Gina Kellogg-Soleil

Kate finally made it!  She’s moving up the ladder and feeling like her career is moving forward.  This is her time to shine, make a difference and create a name for herself.  She has put in her time, proven herself, and now she’s being recognized her for all her hard work.  Kate is being promoted to store manager!

Six months later frustration has set in.  Kate is repeatedly saying there’s not enough time in the day. She’s following all the company’s policies and standard operating processes, and making sure the team is performing its roles and responsibilities.  Emails are checked, deadlines are being met and Kate’s store location couldn’t be more organized.  She’s doing everything “right”, so why are sales down, her store employees disengaged, and customers moderately satisfied at best?  Kate’s spinning, and she needs to see results fast.

Ah, the proverbial new manager’s trap of being so focused on systematic perfection that we forget about what real leadership is and what truly generates results—people.  Sure, when asked what it means to be a leader, Kate, like all of us, can verbally provide the “correct” answer:  great leaders inspire a shared vision, model the way, leverage the strengths of others, yada, yada, yada.  Let’s admit it, although we all know what it means to be a great leader, leadership is hard work, and it takes time and practice. The reality is that great leaders are great because they’ve learned from the many mistakes they’ve made throughout their career.  Kate is experiencing one of the first lesson’s  every great leader learns—results come when you put energy into the people on your team, the people who are customers in your store and the people who are within your network; not from solely following systems and processes.

Like Kate, most new leaders tend to veer away from putting energy toward people, and  they gravitate to a systematic management approach because it’s tangible, easy to measure, and being able to cross off “to do’s” from a list gives a feeling  of success and recognition.  And many times they’re good at it! Yes, it’s important to have these systematic management skills, but they need to be balanced with basic leadership.  If Kate’s your employee, here are three leadership tips that can help shorten the new leadership learning curve:

1.  Trust:  The best thing a new leader can do in their new role is spend their first 90 days focused on building trust.  Yes, that’s correct – trust.  New leaders should spend their first 90 days beginning to build trust with their team by simply observing, talking with employees, and most importantly listening to what their team and customers are sharing.  Building trust requires new leaders to patiently soak in the environment and build relationships.  When trust is built, both employee engagement and customer loyalty increases—a combination that equates to increased revenue for all.  Building trust doesn’t stop after being in a new role for 90 days, though.  The 90 days gives the new leader time to begin establishing behaviors that will allow them to integrate the necessary management tactics.  Once employees trust a new leader, they become engaged, welcome leadership guidance, and will actually want the leader to succeed.

2.  Self-Reflection:  New leaders should immediately get in the habit of looking first at themselves before putting blame onto their employees.  Many new leaders fall into the employee blame game all too easy, making statements such as: “It’s like they don’t even listen,”  “She’s so frustrating,”  “Why can’t they figure out how to do something so simple,” “We’d be so much further ahead if they could only….” Alight new leaders, listen up.  A leader is a direct reflection of his/her team, and a team is a direct reflection of their leader.  What does this exactly mean? When frustration with employees rears its ugly head, it’s often times because a leader’s behavior is triggering a cause and effect reaction.  The solution?  When a new leader finds frustration surfacing, self-reflection is a must.  Here is a series of questions that can help new leaders troubleshoot perceived employee dilemmas:

     1) Is it possible that others have the same frustration with you?
     2) What about your behavior could be causing their frustration?
     3) How can you change your behavior to eliminate the frustration?
     4) How can you apply the same rational to the frustration you're having with your own employees?

3.  Servant Leadership:  It’s all about the people.  In the grand scheme of things, it’s the people on your team and the people who are your customers who achieve the business results.  New leaders can lose sight of how important it is to put down the PDA and put their energy towards their employees and customers.  The misconceived notion of new leaders is that they have been put in a position of authority and granted a title of control.  Great leaders know it’s the employees and customers who are the ones with the real authority and control, and an instrumental part of being a leader is about serving your employees and customers by helping to ensure they have the resources, knowledge and attention necessary to thrive.  Not surprisingly, the concept of serving your people circles directly back to the need for trust.  If a new leader wants results, help them put down the PDA and pick up the habit of servant leadership.

GOOD OLD FASHION VISION

By: Gina Kellogg-Soleil

In the past couple of years many retailers, regardless of size, have been frantically trying to figure out how to keep their retail operation successful. How to keep consumers buying, employees motivated and the bottom-line in the black. Executives are in the boardroom strategizing, layoffs are skyrocketing and employees continue asking “What are we doing” as the new flavor of the month is introduced - AGAIN. Sound familiar?

The nature of the retail beast is high-paced and ever-changing—which is the exact reason why most of us have stayed in the industry as long as we have. We tend to pride ourselves on having an entrepreneurial spirit and pulling out all the stops to make “it” happen. Although fantastically fun and rewarding from a management perspective, as we continue to blaze-the-trail making “it” happen, our employees and consumers can’t figure out what “it” is. In many cases, this “making it happen” tendency is causing retailers to commit bottom-line suicide.

The solution? Define “it” with a good old fashion vision. When retailers know where the company is going, their employees get excited about being part of the journey. Having a clearly defined vision motivates employees to get “it” done. Having a vision won’t solve all the economic challenges retailers have been faced with over the past couple years, but it will better position the company to meet these challenges head on and continue to grow and thrive when the going gets tough.

If you’re a retailer without a vision, don’t worry you’re not alone. No time like the present! Here are a few steps to get your company or department moving forward in the right direction:

Clarity: Clearly define “it” with a vision! A vision is NOT the mission/purpose of your company. A mission/purpose is why your company or department exists, a vision is specifically where your company or department is going. Most retailers have a clear mission/purpose (which is great), but have no common vision for employees to rally around. Vision creates momentum. Vision helps employees see how their role, behaviors and choices are helping to move the company forward.

Connect: Help employees connect themselves to the vision. Every employee should be able to clearly understand how their role, behaviors and choices connect to the company vision. When employees feel their choices directly impact where the company is headed, consumers reap the benefit of highly engaged employees. The result—Increased revenue.

Communicate: 360 degree communication! Every employee should hear, read, discuss and see the vision. It’s not enough to have the vision posted in the employee breakroom. You need to ask employees their opinion about where the company is going and ask them to communicate how their role, behaviors and choices connect to the vision. Ask employees how they live the vision!

Be Consistent: The hardest piece of the puzzle. LIVE the vision consistently. Do not launch a vision as the flavor of the month. If you’re a typical retailer it’s going to take at least 90 days of consistent behavior from management, and visual communication, for employees to even begin trusting that the vision is a mainstay in the company. Consistency takes discipline, and does not just happen because it was a directive during the latest district or regional sales call. As you craft the vision, make sure you craft a plan that will help management keep the vision alive.

The One Asset Every Effective Leader Must Have

By: Nick Tasler

It’s not charisma. It’s not intelligence, either. It’s not even integrity. It’s a skill that all of us have, but surprisingly few of us know how to maximize.

What is the one thing all effective leaders have in common? That’s the multi-billion dollar question posed virtually every day from Minneapolis to Mumbai by store managers and sales associates to the top brass in the C-suites.

To find out, let’s do a quick experiment. Take a few seconds to imagine the most effective leader you’ve ever worked with. Get a clear image of that person in your mind. Was that leader bold or sensitive? Were they known for being charismatic or soft-spoken? Were they visionary or pragmatic? Were they book-smart or streetwise?

An effective leader can be any one of those things, can’t they? The only thing every effective leader does is make good decisions—good people decisions and good strategy decisions. Here’s why: Other people—whether they are hourly sales associates, corporate team members or company shareholders—won’t follow somebody whose choices lead to dead ends. Without good decisions, no amount of charisma or honest intentions can save a leader from failure.

How to Start Making Better Decisions
The good news is that anyone can become a better decision-maker by better understanding the two key elements that produce a decision: the person and the situation. Think of it like this: Person x Situation = Decision.

Most decision-making experts focus on identifying how people make decisions in different situations. For example, if people are given a choice between one bird in the hand or two birds in the bush, we know from common sense and decades of research that most people will—you guessed it—take a bird in the hand. Sounds right, doesn’t it?

The problem is that “people” don’t make your decisions, you do. So, it doesn’t matter that three out of four people will choose a bird in the hand, if you’re the fourth person who dove headfirst into the bush. It doesn’t matter if three out of four people are reluctant to open that new store in Shanghai or invest in that new social media channel if you’re the fourth one who already signed the lease and uploaded your avatar on TheNewNewThing.com.

What matters is that you understand how you tend to make decisions, as well as how you leverage that tendency for the best results. You not only need to know whether you’ll make the decision or not, but also how you’ll tend to execute it, how you’ll tend to adjust during the process, and how you’ll learn from it in order to make an even better decision the next time.

Be Your Own Coach

By: Nick Tasler

In today’s highly uncertain environment, wouldn’t it be nice to have a wise advisor available to you 24/7? Help keep you, your team, and your organization on track?

In fact, that sagely guidance is more accessible to you than you think, and it doesn’t even require you to keep a high-priced executive coach on retainer. You could be just the advisor you’ve been looking for.

Executive coaches perform two essential functions. First, they provide clients with sound, objective advice. Secondly, they help clients execute that advice. With a few simple yet highly effective, proven techniques you can start tapping into your inner coach.

How to Give Yourself Sound Advice
Recall someone you know - a colleague, an employee or boss - who recently made a decision that they now regret. You saw it coming. Your advice was right on the money, even though you’re too big of a person to say “I told you so” (even if you're thinking it).

Now, think of a regrettable decision that you made recently. Maybe you wasted budget dollars on that unnecessary office equipment, or let your envy of a competitor drive you into a saturated market. Or maybe you compounded a problem with your team by putting off a tough decision. In hindsight, the right choice was clear all along, but you botched it up.

We’ve all been in both of these situations. Why is it that we’re so good at giving advice to other people, but so often blunder when giving ourselves advice?

It's all about objectivity and emotion. When we dish out advice to others, we really don’t have anything to lose or to gain, which removes emotion from the situation. So, we can give clear advice on what someone should do because we don’t have a vested interest. On the other hand, our emotions kick into overdrive when we’re the ones taking the big risk or potentially receiving the big reward.

But with just a little imagination we can overcome our less rational selves. Psychologists have discovered that when people imagine a situation as though it were happening to a friend instead of to themselves, they are able to think much more logically. Katherine Milkman, a researcher at the Wharton School, explains that this simple trick can shift our entire mode of thinking. Pretending that we are the coach advising the client moves us from what psychologists call "system 1" thinking (the “want” system driven by our impulses and emotions) to "system 2" thinking (the more deliberate and logical “should” system).

So, the next time you’re trying to decide what to do, imagine that a friend has come to you for guidance on the situation. What would you advise?

Of course, once you’ve adopted that outside perspective and decided what you need to do, the next step is to actually follow the course of action.

How to Act on Sound Advice
NYU Psychologist Peter Gollwitzer and his colleagues have amassed more than two decades of evidence supporting the idea that wording can make all the difference between intention and action. When we frame our advice with an if-then format, we are far more likely to follow through. For example, instead of saying that you “want to spend more time on strategic planning,” or that you “will try to be more strategic this month” you should phrase it as “if I’m still at the office after Wednesday’ status meeting, then I will spend 30 minutes on strategic planning.”

The power of the if-then format comes from its ability to create instant habits. The “if” part of the statement places an automatic reminder in your brain to be on the lookout for a specific situation. When your brain recognizes that you are indeed sitting in your office after Wednesday’s status meeting, it automatically cues you to perform the “then” action (i.e. “spend 30 minutes on strategic planning.”) If-then formatting replaces the years of behavioral conditioning it would normally take to create a habit. Gollwitzer has found that if-then phrasing makes people as much as two to three times more likely to stick to an exercising regimen, eat healthier, avoid distraction, and do just about anything else that typically pits us against our own wills and wants. The same technique can help you bridge the gap between your intentions and your behaviors.

One day, you might find that you want the expert guidance of a bona fide executive coach. Until then, you can turn yourself into a quality interim by taking an outside perspective on your future courses of action, and by using if-then planning to execute them.