A few weeks ago, I was speaking to a former colleague of mine. In a past life of mine, we worked side-by-side in the Head Office of a big retailer in Canada. At the time, I was a leader in the Marketing Department and she was climbing the ladder over on the Store Operations side of the business. She is now leading Store Operations for that same retailer and I, of course, am here at Graff Retail doing my best to support retailers far and wide with all of their training endeavours.
After catching up a bit, our chat moved over to reminiscing about how she landed in her current leadership role. Our walk down memory lane revealed some interesting truths about the contrast between how much training she received during her days at store level vs. the lack of training she has been exposed to since moving into Head Office and continues to progress in her retail career. My path at Head Office was the same. Promotions came my way and I just jumped in and figured it out. But how much better could I have been? It was a bit laughable to be honest.
While most leaders at retail Head Offices are well equipped to handle the technical aspects of their jobs, so many have never been trained to actually lead and manage their teams who are in critical roles that support the store level. Their roles have a direct impact on store performance, yet a lot of Head Office teams still lack synergy, work in silos and struggle with communication. In a lot of cases, the Store Managers in retail organizations have better leadership skills and more training on how to manage their sales teams than any of the Managers and leaders at their Head Office! That’s backwards when you think about the trickle-down effect that great leadership (or not so great leadership) has in an organization.
At Graff Retail, we talk all the time about the potential in retail stores and we focus our efforts on providing various training solutions to drive performance at store level. But what about the potential in our Head Office teams? What kind of ongoing training are they receiving? If you are having the same revelation my former colleague and I had, and now realize just how little training is going on inside your Head Office, I think we can help.
We are enlisting the expertise of our Vice President, Linda Montalbano. Linda is introducing a new series of workshops designed to eliminate the biggest challenges that we see amongst the retail Head Office teams out there. In fact, Kevin and Linda just hosted a webinar last week on The Untapped Potential of Your Head Office Teams. If you missed it, click here to tune in! You can also check out some of Linda’s hot workshop topics here.
