Speaker 1: This is the first in my video series about my five principles of retail leadership. So the first one that I talked about on my video just the other day is uphold the standards of the organization with care and compassion. Right now, we are in a very precarious position as employers, right, as leaders, where the power, if you will, is more shifted to the associates. And that's not necessarily a bad thing. Now, I live in the Quad Cities on the Iowa side. Of course, this is where John Deere is headquartered, right? So we just witnessed this play out in many ways with John Deere and the UAW union as the workers are trying to negotiate for better terms and the company is trying to figure out what's the best way that they're gonna work with these individuals going forward. And luckily, eventually, they did come to an agreement. And I'm happy to see friends of mine who are with the UAW back at work, and I'm happy to see friends of mine who work for John Deere, you know, not having to drive a forklift in the middle of the night in addition to their regular job. So it's an interesting dynamic to see both sides of this and how that played out. But this is playing out all over the retail industry in a lot of ways, right? We have the great resignation, this concept that there are so many associates right now who are quitting their jobs, and in some cases, choosing not to work at all, waiting for a better opportunity to come up or trying to create a better opportunity for themselves on their own. This isn't unique just to retail, but I think we feel it particularly strong in retail because there are companies out there, stores out there that are not able to keep their doors open because they don't have enough associates. All over town as I drive around, I see signs, now hiring, now hiring, you know, applicants inside. And these are restaurants, these are retailers, it's everywhere. An individual who wants a job right now certainly can get a job. The question is, do they want that job? Do they feel the value and the meaning behind the work that they are doing? There are certainly some greater economic forces at work right now that are driving associates to this point, this breaking point, if you will, where they are looking for something that's gonna provide a more fulfilling experience in their professional life. So we've talked about why it's happening and some of the examples of things we see going on, but what do we do about it? If we are experiencing that in our own company, if you have stores where you're not able to keep the doors open because associates are not applying, associates are not staying and you're struggling with that retention, what do you do to fix that problem? Think about all the different communications that you have with an associate of yours in a given day, in a given week, and in a given month. It's a finite number, but it's probably more communications than you realize. In a given day, you may be providing coaching multiple times to that associate. You may be providing information at several times with that associate. Within a week, you may have opportunities to provide some recognition, perhaps to have a one-on-one on a regular basis. When you look across the month, maybe you have a monthly review or you have a mid-month review. Because of the short-staffed nature of the retail industry right now, perhaps that associate is stretched very thin and having to do work for not just themselves, but multiple people. If you add up all of those different communications that you have in a given week, or a given day, or even a given month, odds are it's in the hundreds. Every single communication that you have with one of your associates is an opportunity to provide them with a feeling of worth and value. I'm not perfect at this, but I aspire, and I think we should all aspire, to provide in every single communication that we have with associates, a feeling of value and worth as a person to me, their employer, to their leader, and also to the company and to the work that they are doing. Oftentimes, we see associates who appreciate their local leader, but may not always appreciate what is being done on a company level. They don't always connect the dots. That's our job, too, to help them connect the dots with the initiatives and the work and the progress that is being done on a company level with the communications that are provided at a local level by their direct leader that they're in contact with frequently. So we've got all these different opportunities to communicate with an associate. If we don't treat each one of those as a critical moment of impact, we miss a ton of opportunity and a lot of ways that we can retain that associate. Now, I know this feels very touchy-feely, but there are a lot of things that you cannot control. This is one of the things that you can control, one of the things that helps an associate feel safe, feel like they are part of a more family-centered team instead of just a cog in a wheel. What might that look like in an everyday interaction? Rather than having an interaction that goes like this, associate, thanks for coming in today, and I just wanted to let you know about a couple of updates in the system so that you knew how to do the transaction correctly. Also, we've got XYZ inventory that just came in, so I'm gonna need your help checking those in. All right, thanks, talk to you later. Instead of that, letting the associate know, hey, the other day when you came in and you worked a few extra hours, man, I sure appreciated that. The customer that you were helping, I was watching her, she was loving the heck out of it. You did an awesome job really getting her excited and feeling good, because I could tell she was stressed out when she walked in, so great job. I'm gonna share with you just a couple of functional things that you're gonna need to know today to help you be successful about the system and about inventory. If I could get your help there, that would be amazing, but I just want you to know how much I appreciate and value you. You're really making a difference on this team. And it's okay for everyone to be on the nose about how you feel about that associate and their contribution, as long as you're sincere about it. It's okay to just state it like that, I really value you. I have six children, four of them, the four oldest are all teenagers. That's right, count them, four teenagers in one house. Anyway, so they sniff out insincerity like a bloodhound. So you cannot, you cannot get anything by these children. Well, adults are no different. We know, we know, we're just more polite about it usually. And so if they know you're being sincere, it will mean something to them. So you may have heard in the news, it's been in the news a bunch lately, about this CEO of better.com that purportedly fired 900 associates on a three minute Zoom call. Okay, none of us probably were there unless you just happened to have worked for him or on this video. If so, please leave a comment. That would be really interesting to hear from you. But that is something I'm gonna withhold judgment on because I'm an outsider and I don't have all the facts, but it sounds quite terrible. And it sounds like something really hard to go through. And I think perhaps more important than the incident itself is the general response to it. I think that's very indicative of where people are at right now. So let me go back to this concept of every communication being a really critical moment. That goes literally for every communication. You need to view every communication as it is a development opportunity for the associates. Whether it's positive, whether it's constructive, does not matter. That even goes all the way up to termination. If you are in the unfortunate position where you're going to be terminating someone, it may not be, certainly wasn't what any of us probably wanted, going in to the initial hiring decision and that associates trajectory and career through the company. But it happens. If you end up in that situation as a leader, obviously the person sitting across from you is another human being and treating them as such is critical and also protects your company from liability. But remember this, the way that you treat that person in that situation is not only just because you care about them as a person and because you're protecting the company, but it's something that might actually be helpful to them later down the road in their career. So if you provide a great, for what it is, right, a great communication experience, that could be helpful to them. So no matter what the situation, your job as a leader is to make it the best it can possibly be under those circumstances. So lastly, I want to go back to the original concept that I talked about when I started this video and that was upholding the standards of the organization. Now I've talked a lot about, you know, really caring for the individual that's going to help you retain them and making sure that you're caring and compassionate in all the communications, even if you're delivering a hard coaching, even if you're delivering a determination, no matter what it is, providing that caring. But I also want to stress, you must first, your first responsibility is to uphold the standards of the organization, right? So you can be the safety net for the company, but you can't be the safety net for the associate, which is a hard message to take, but it's critical. So your first and foremost responsibility as a leader is to make sure that you understand what the expectations of the company actually are and that you are making sure that you and your team are fulfilling those expectations at all times. If you take care of those things, everything else typically will fall into place. Now I'm excited to talk to you about the next principle. It'll be in a separate video. So staff to sell, that's the second principle. And I have a lot of thoughts about that in terms of retention, in terms of how to hire correctly and some ways to avoid very, very common pitfalls that we often fall into in retail that cause really short 10 years with associates. I'm Mike Richards, and this has been my first principle of retail leadership. If you enjoyed this video, go ahead and leave a like, leave a comment. I would love to hear if you have had experiences with associates where you had to uphold the standards of the organization, but you had to do it with a lot of care and compassion. Was this helpful to you? If you like this content, go ahead and subscribe. I'll continue to put out more videos on these five principles of retail leadership, along with a lot of other topics that I'm very excited to talk to you about.