Being a More Effective Leader – Share Your Knowledge, Develop Others (Part V)

We have covered many ideas in the previous few articles that you can incorporate into your routines to help continue your journey of being an effective leader in retail, or anywhere. Here are five more ideas that you can make your own and begin as quickly as it makes sense for you to do so.

1. Foster a team environment

Depending on your situation and exact work environment, team connectivity has been a challenge over the past ten months, limiting exposure by social distancing. However, there are ways that you can continue to promote a team environment regardless of your setting. If you are in a store, having a virtual team meeting is possible. The use of Zoom or FaceTime is possible, for free. It may seem unusual, but the former Saturday or Sunday team meetings can still occur with some planning and basic set up on the team’s part. There are some obvious considerations, including using technology that is available to everyone and working with your Human Resources partners to ensure everyone’s time is properly accounted for when holding work driven team meetings.

The idea of virtual meetings or connection is more of a reality and becoming familiar to most people now. As a District Manager or above, holding virtual events both for learning or socialization are real possibilities. Not every meeting or get together virtually has to be one hundred percent business-focused. It is healthy to have an opportunity to socialize and get to know peers outside the work aspects. Encouraging this can help build a stronger team connection, which will lead to better ‘on the clock’ performance and engagement.

2. Be more self-aware

This can be a very challenging and tricky activity for any leader. Being self-aware is hard but critically important. This idea could also combine with finding a mentor, or at the very least, a trusted advisor. You need to have someone that can assist in your personal assessment. Understanding how other people perceive you can make a significant difference in connecting and influencing others. If people see you as untrustworthy, difficult to work with, or arrogant as examples, building meaningful, trusted relationships will be almost impossible. 

Knowing is always the first step. It may be difficult to hear or realize that you are being viewed in a certain way. Once you know, you can take actions to correct, improve, or even apologize for your behaviors or tendencies. Acknowledging it with others goes a long way in making amends. Oftentimes they will volunteer to assist in correcting the behaviors. They can let you know when they see those undesired activities play out and help you diagnose the triggers to prevent them from happening in the future. 

Take some time to be honest with yourself. Find a trusted partner to discuss and work through your findings and their feedback. Then, build a personal action plan to make the necessary adjustments.

3. Be tech-savvy

Technology is playing a larger and larger role in our lives each day. We could debate whether that is always a good thing or not, but it is a current reality. Learning new things to work within that environment is an opportunity for many leaders. If you limit yourself to just what your IT team shares with you or the training team provides, you may be missing out on some opportunities to put that technology to work for you. There is no shortage of learning avenues for most technology. There are YouTube videos, online training sites, and vendor learning portals that can be used to understand how the technology you have available works. 

Simply doing a Google search for whatever software application you want to learn more about will likely produce more results than you could ever get through, so spend some time refining what you want to learn and then settle on a few to check out. If they do not resonate with you or your needs, then move on to another if it works better for you.

If you’re curious about how technology might work together with something else, for example, how to share my screen during a Zoom call, there is plenty of information on that available. Can I connect my phone to a TV to show something during a meeting? Yes, you can, and there are probably hundreds of thousands of resources available to show you how you can do it. Set aside a few minutes each week to explore what more your phone can do outside checking email and making calls. Your laptop can likely do more work for you than you realize. The small investment in time can really pay off.

4. Spend time on yourself

Spending time on yourself can be hard. I know it is for me. There is always something else that can be done that serves others or feels like it is a priority to get done. This is one that has to be conscious and possibly scheduled. Then you have to determine what it means for you. I look at this in three levels – there are things I do that are for the benefit of others (work), even if I know it helps me in my job, it is still completed because it is for those I work with. Next is the in-between items. Writing, for example, is one I consider a ‘both’ scenario. I love writing, and it allows me to clear my head of ideas and thoughts, even though I am sharing it with others in the hope that it will serve them. Finally, there are the things done purely for yourself. This might be exercise, reading a fiction book, taking a nap, engaging in your hobby. My go-to is LEGO building, that is done purely for me. It is a quiet time when I can fully engage in something I enjoy. I tune out the rest of the world and concentrate on putting bricks together.

5. Look for solutions

Very few people like those that find a problem for every solution. But everyone loves someone who comes to the table with workable solutions. This is at the core of having a growth mindset. It can be too easy to make quick assumptions on what will likely happen. When you feel yourself jumping to that point of view, pause, and challenge yourself to think about what other alternatives can happen. This frequently comes up when an emotionally driven subject comes up. Think about how you feel, as a Store Manager or District Manager, when you hear someone say what will happen if we cut payroll? We immediately react in a way that assumes the worst. Most of us have been dealing with a reduction in labor resources for our retail careers. 

Pausing for a moment to explore possible other solutions can then open up future opportunities to expand. By taking a step in a new direction, you may be able to move further forward down the road than you can right now. Asking what would it take to make that possible is a good way to begin challenging your mind and your initial thoughts to define what could be very new solutions to existing, long-standing problems.

Over the past two weeks we have looked at twenty-five ideas that you can put into action for yourself this year. As I mentioned before, do not try to do them all. Select which ones will make the most sense for you and when. You can lay out a plan for the year and work on specific items during different windows of time in the year ahead. Don’t be afraid to adjust or tweak anything mentioned to fit your needs, your style, and your particular situation.

How will you incorporate these ideas or any of the previous ones into your system over the course of the year?

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