Time Management

To manage your time effectively, you have to understand why Retail Manager's need a unique approach to time management.  

There are a lot of people working in a number of industries that just can’t use the standard time management techniques that are out there. And retail is certainly one of them.

To a limited extent, Retail Manager’s at Head Office level can use standard time management techniques but, even still, if they are in the field as often as they should be, they will not be able to operate at peak effectiveness by following those techniques.

Consider some of the obvious differences:

    Retail stores are open to the public for many hours each day and most days of the week. Some are 24/7... Monday to Friday, 8 – 5 simply doesn’t exist in the retail world.

    We can’t get to the bottom of the inbox by simply working late.

    There is rarely an office door for Retail Manager’s to close.

    There is no ‘do not disturb’ function on the phone. Customers may be calling.

    Retail Managers do not have the luxury of planning the majority of their time.

    We need to drop everything when the customer arrives and their precise time of arrival cannot be predicted!

    The workload can vary dramatically depending on how many customers arrive at the same time.

    When shipments are early or late…schedules and plans become useless.

    Stores are staffed by people working shifts.

    Each function being performed in a store is usually being handled by more than one person.
 

    Communication between team members is more complicated due to the nature of the business.

In retail, we need to work differently when it comes to managing our time. We need to learn how to manage our time using some best practices in a somewhat uncontrolled environment.

To improve your effectiveness, attend our one day workshop in time management for only R995.00 all course material included.

For further information please contact training@mretailing.co.za for this and various other training workshops.

Retail Sales to grow 4.5% this year

In real terms it is expected that retail sales will grow by 4.5% versus 5.7% last year. Consumers are under greater financial pressure due to the increase of cost of living which is driven by the likes of fuel and electricity hikes. Although this anticipated growth is showing a slight decline on the previous year, it is however still almost 50% better than the average anticipated GDP growth for the country.

The total value of formal retail sales is expected to amount to just over R 747 Billion Rand. According to Market Research at the University of SA the retail outlets which are expected to show the highest real growth rates are General Dealers (4.8%) Furniture and Appliances (5.0% and the leaders being Clothing, Footwear and Leather retailers (7.0%).

6 Habits of True Strategic Thinkers

Many business leaders are frustrated that they spend too much time on the day-to-day issues and not get around to the strategic part of their business. Here's some tips on how to become the strategic leader your company needs.

If you find yourself resisting "being strategic," because it sounds like a fast track to irrelevance, or vaguely like an excuse to slack off, you're not alone. 

Every leader's temptation is to deal with what's directly in front of you, things that make an immediate impact on the bottom line, and also because it always seems more urgent and concrete. Unfortunately, if you do that, you put your company at risk. While you concentrate on steering around potholes, you'll miss windfall opportunities, not to mention any signals that the road you're on is leading off a cliff.

This is a tough job, make no mistake. "We need strategic leaders in South Africa!” is a pretty constant refrain at every company, large and small. One reason the job is so tough: no one really understands what it entails. It's hard to be a strategic leader if you don't know what strategic leaders are supposed to do.

Adaptive strategic leaders — the kind who thrive in today’s uncertain environment – do six things well:

Anticipate 

Most of the focus at most companies is on what’s directly ahead. The leaders lack “peripheral vision.” This can leave your business vulnerable to rivals who detect and act on ambiguous signals. To anticipate well, you must:

• Look for game-changing information at the periphery of your industry

• Search beyond the current boundaries of your business

• Build wide external networks to help you scan the horizon better

• Reframe problems to get to the bottom of things, in terms of root causes (root cause analysis)

• Challenge current beliefs and mind-sets, including your own

• Uncover hypocrisy, manipulation, and bias in organizational decisions

• Seek patterns in multiple sources of data

• Encourage others to do the same

• Question prevailing assumptions and test multiple hypotheses simultaneously (Don't just take things at face value)

• Carefully frame the decision to get to the crux of the matter

• Balance speed, rigor, quality and agility. 

• Take a stand even with incomplete information and amid diverse views. The Pareto principle applies in most cases where 20% of the analysis will give you 80% of the outcome and, by spending much more time and money on over analyzing to the end degree, you will in most cases reach the same outcome regarding the decision you need to take if you had stopped at 20% of the analysis. 

• Understand what drives other people's agendas, including what remains hidden (It is sometimes not what you see or hear, but rather what you don't see or hear)

• Bring tough issues to the surface, even when it's uncomfortable (Make the tough calls)

• Assess risk tolerance and follow through to build the necessary support

• Encourage and exemplify honest, rigorous debriefs to extract lessons

• As a leader you must always encourage your team to " Don't tell me what you think I want to hear, rather tell me how it really is"

• Shift course quickly if you realize you're off track (eliminate the red tape) 

• Celebrate both success and (well-intentioned) failures that provide insight

Think Critically

“Conventional wisdom” opens you to fewer raised eyebrows and second guessing. But if you swallow every management fad, herd like belief, and safe opinion at face value, your company loses all competitive advantage. Critical thinkers question everything. To master this skill you must force yourself to:

Interpret 

Ambiguity is unsettling. Faced with it, the temptation is to reach for a fast (and potentially wrongheaded) solution.  A good strategic leader holds steady, synthesizing information from many sources before developing a viewpoint. To get good at this, you have to:

Decide

Many leaders fall prey to “analysis paralysis.” You have to develop processes and enforce them, so that you arrive at a “good enough” position. To do that well, you have to:

Align

Total consensus is rare. A strategic leader must foster open dialogue, build trust and engage key stakeholders, especially when views diverge.  To pull that off, you need to:

Learn

As your business grows, honest feedback is harder and harder to come by.   You have to do what you can to keep it coming. This is crucial because success and failure--especially failure--are valuable sources of organizational learning.  

 Make sure you set time aside to dedicate to strategic thinking - Good luck!

www.mretailing.co.za

3 out of 4 new appointments fail

Hiring and retaining the best people is one of the most critical jobs the owner or manager of a company has. In surveys, most rate their success at about one excellent hire out of four. The other three either weren’t a good fit or didn’t have the ability that their training or resume indicated.

That’s a huge problem. As Jim Collins wrote in his indispensable management book “Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap ... and Others Don't,” getting the “right people on the bus and the right people in the right seats” is the most essential task in business.

While good hires energize those around them, bad hires become energy drains. Bad appointments dampen productivity and suck up management time and attention.  

Often, it’s not skills or credentials that predict success. What really matters is whether the prospective candidate fits the job. Do they have characteristics that match those of your top performers? It sounds a bit squishy, and yes, hiring may be part art, but it’s also a science. You can assign metrics to the characteristics that make a difference in performance and better predict candidates’ success.

Here are five tips that may help you hire and retain top performers.

1.   Use a structured hiring process that goes beyond resumes and interviews.

We begin by determining the applicant’s basic employability characteristics: integrity, reliability, and work ethic. This assessment helps screen out people who are not likely to perform well or fit your performance culture. 

2.   Get an objective understanding of your best people.

Study your top performers; develop a performance model--a benchmark-- for that position. Once these have been established then look for a close match between the applicants’ scores and the performance benchmark. You can use the information to coach employees, determine training needs as well as for promotion and succession planning decisions.

3.   Develop customized performance models.

 One size does not fit all. Slight differences in the model may have a big impact on performance. Start with critical or problem positions where productivity or turnover may be an issue. Be certain that your performance metrics are objective and clearly identified so you can differentiate between top and bottom performers. The model that derives from this process will help you improve performance in all your positions.

 4.   Have your supervisors and/or management also take the assessment.

This way, they can better understand themselves and their direct reports, and coach them toward increased productivity. The reports give supervisors a “user’s manual” for each direct report that shows challenge areas, how to motivate them and how to get a better performance.

5.  Repeat for every hire, for every position.

More input will produce better benchmarking. If this sounds like reverse engineering, it is. This method has proved to be highly reliable, helping achieve good hires three times out of four versus the one out of four times.

 This approach will definitely help you to consistently identify, hire, retain, and manage great employees.

For any retail training requirements, please contact us at training@mretailing.co.za or visit our website www.mretailing.co.za