Sarah Lindsey-Banks, in her job re-organizing and bringing Harley-Davidson stores into the world of modern retailing, developed a formula for choosing qualities most needed for the position of a store manager.
1. Will the prospect be a good shopkeeper?
She discovered that good managers were truly small store shopkeepers. Often, she found, career oriented corporate trained men and women saw this position only as a temporary assignment on the way to the corner office of the big mother ship of headquarters. Yes, they would be accountable. Yes, their stores would make progress and yes, they would be acceptable managers . But what was not there was the light in their eyes, the excitement and spirit of ownership that successful small store shopkeepers carry with them each and every day. For some, managing a store is only a step along the way. For the best managers, they are shopkeepers who are proud of who they are and what their store provides for the local gardeners. They like their little store. They enjoy the business.
2. Does the candidate have a “warm heart?”
The most important trait of a manager is that he or she is “human” and not a corporate machine. Each day, experiences with customers, suppliers, and employees require that the manager understands and solves issues from, above all, a human perspective. Most of the solutions are not found in any company manual. They are found with a coming to terms with face to face understanding and empathy. The candidate must use good judgment in balancing the business perspective of green garden gates with the human perspective of the people who are connected with us.
There is a 5 ½ inch by 7 ½ inch card, The Nordstrom Employee Handbook, which says “Our only rule…Use Good Judgment in All Situations”
New employee orientation
“The
By Robert Spector and Patrick McCarthy
3. Will the candidate learn, teach and delegate?
The world is full of managers who fall into their desks in the morning and follow the same old patterns. They stopped learning a long time ago. They open the faded moth eaten pages of their minds and do it all over again. Green garden gates is a fast moving ever changing palette of colors. Is the candidate ready and eager to learn? Does the life of the candidate indicate that learning is of absolute importance? And with this learning, can the candidate freely teach others to be as good as or more effective as he or she? Or is the candidate afraid to teach and to share knowledge, fearing the lost of power, position or worth? After the teaching, can this person delegate the task or does he or she hold the task not allowing the student to put this knowledge to good use for green garden gates?
"Develop your people to do their job better than you can. Transfer your skills to them. This is an exciting goal, but it can be threatening to a manager who worries that he is training his replacement. If you are concerned, ask your boss: "If I develop somebody who can do my job super well, does the company have some other challenge for me or not?' Many smart managers like to see their employees increase their responsibilities because it frees the managers to tackle new or undone tasks. There is no shortage of jobs for good managers. The world has an infinite amount of work to be done."
Bill Gates
Microsoft
4. Is the candidate an adventurer?
This journey is full of adventure and excitement. Does the professional and personal history of the candidate point to an adventurer of life or an observer of life? Where have they traveled? Has the candidate been involved in exciting groundbreaking projects? Has the candidate’s life been a squiggly line of discovery or has he or she followed a gradual arc of safety on the journey?
5. Is there energy there?
Green garden gates is all about energy and enthusiasm. Is the candidate a postal carrier for the government, who does the route and goes home to sleep or is the candidate the person who has been humping up and down a UPS truck in the middle of the night? What does the candidate do during the after work and weekends? What projects does the candidate work on?
6. Does the candidate watch the pennies?
The financial health of green garden gates depends largely on the ability of the manager to watch the money entering and leaving the business. Is the candidate fiscally responsible? How does this person manage his own checkbook? Can the candidate determine if an expense is profitable to green garden gates or a silly outlay of money that just causes a drop in the bottom line?
7. Can the candidate sell and close?
This is our business, moving products and services to the customers. Do we have a manager who sells or a manager who observes? Can the candidate close the deal? Do we have a candidate with a job history of boxing up the perfume or someone who sells the perfume? If there is no ability to sell effectively, there is no room for this person as a manager.
8. Does the candidate have “pride in ownership”?
Green garden gates is a place of beauty. Will this person manage the business with a pride or beauty and orderliness? Or is this store just “good enough”. How does the candidate take care of his personal possessions? How does he or she present themselves in day to day living?
9. Is this person a “problem solver?” Does the candidate do what it takes to finish the job?
Can the candidate see the problem, find a solution and pull the trigger to solve the issue quickly and efficiently? Or does the person need endless time to make the choice allowing the problem fester and grow worse?
"Don't make the same decision twice. Spend the time and thought to make a solid decision the first time so that you do not revisit the issue unnecessarily. If you are too willing to reopen issues, if interferes not only with your execution but also with your motivation to make a decision in the first place. People hate indecisive leadership; However, that does not mean you have to decide everything the moment is comes to your attention. Nor that you can't ever reconsider a decision."
Bill Gates
Microsoft
The Blab Off
My grandmother and grandfather got their first television set in the 1950’s. They bought the television trays and ate their dinner in front of the set each evening laughing at “I love Lucy”. Soon they grew tired and annoyed at all those commercials.
Grandma called Johnny, the repair guy to our house. He connected a long electrical cord to the back of the set, put a light switch on the end of it and ran it over to her chair. One flick of the switch and the sound was muted. No more commercials! She called it her "blab off".
It wasn’t some fancy engineer that invented the first remote. It was my grandmother sitting in her living room in her Nebraska home, switching off and on her “blab off”. She solved the problem and got the job done!
We found this "country gate in rural Vermont. No need to buy a gate, just drag a wrecked car over there.
That's getting the job done!! I think that we will invest in a gate lol
10. Is the candidate an artist with a creative soul?
A monkey can be trained to put together a “plan o gram” from the head office. It is the artist, the creative person who can embellish the product, make it more appealing, giving light to the feature. Do we have just a bean counter as a manager or do we have an artist?
11. Does the candidate have flexibility and patience? Is the person a good listener?
There are twists and turns in the excitement of green garden gates. Changes of tasks occur sometimes hourly. But it is important to be flexible with this team of employees, giving them the ability to decide what is best to execute the task and the patience to allow the job to get done successfully. Will the candidate take the attitude that he or she is the boss and only knows the right answers or will this person be flexible and patient?
12. Will the candidate break the rules?
Funny Question right?
The answer the candidate gives has profound impact on how every employee in our store will conduct themselves and how every customer is handled in the sale. If a manager follows THE RULES, blindly and rigidly, we are in big trouble.
“Gordon Bethune became Chairman and CEO of Continental Airlines in 1994. He soon discovered that the Continental employee manual was a compilation of maddingly specific rules and regulations that ranged from the shade of a pencil that had to be used to mark boarding passes to the type of meals that could be served to delayed passengers.
The manual also specifically described job responsibilities that employees were unable to deviate from them for fear of punishment. The gate agent was forbidden from clearing up problems because the previous management preferred that agents just stand there and feel the wrath of frustrated customers.
To dramatically make the point that things were going to be different from now on, Bethune needed to come up with a sensational symbol of changing times. One day he assembled a number of employees, gave them copies of the manual and led them on a parade out to the parking lot. There, the employees summarily set the manuals on fire, a task they thoroughly enjoyed!
And he sent word into the field that henceforth we wanted our employees to use their judgment, to consider the interests of both the company and the customer.”
From “The
By Spector and McCarthy
13. Is this person honest and forthright?
Honest with him or herself, honest with his or her capabilities and honest with his or her personal shortcomings? We, at green garden gates, have no tolerance for shading of the truth. We want to hear the bad news now, unvarnished and raw and we want to hear it the first of a conversation, not the last of the discussion.
"Mr. Corleone is a man who insists on hearing bad new immediately"
Tom Hagen to Woltz
The Godfather
#14. Does the candidate have a “mentor” in his or her personal and professional life?
“After twenty-five years in the garden store business, I wish I would have had a me around when I was young and just starting”
Brad Teeform
Garden store owner
This is question that gives real insight into the candidate. Does the person place great value in the lesson learned from someone who has been down the path before. That trial and error history can save countless hours of problem solving and tons of money. Often, young managers are so determined to blaze the trail themselves that they resent the opinions and conclusions of others who have been there. What are some specific examples where the mentor has helped with the success of a problem or project?
When I was a young guy, I worked in
We set the case down, straightened and leveled it. The large case had completely blocked the only two aisles in the store. No one could get past the case on either side to shop. The mother started crying and the father started yelling. The young man just stood there. He refused our offer to take it back. He was going to show his father that he knew better. He was smarter. He was in charge now. The case was his with no place to put it except right there blocking the aisles. That case was destined to ruin this old family business.
Don’t you think that over fifty years of walking up and down that store, the couple did not think about a larger case to increase their business? Don’t you think that they had measured that space many many times trying to think of ways to fit a new case there and that they told their son over and over that it would not work? The son didn’t care what they thought. He just wanted that new case and he was going to fit the thing in there.
We drove off that day with everybody yelling at each other. The old couple watched their customers now unable to get even a loaf of bread at the back of their store!
Listen to Experience. Listen to others who have walked that path before you. Understand that experience matters.
Shut up and listen!
#15. Does the candidate see the vision and have the perseverance to move toward success no matter what obstacles are in the path?
It is difficult in those lonely early cold spring weeks; to keep plodding along, get the displays built and the plants ready for sale. It’s easy to put off the work and wait for some warm days for that nasty work. But, when the warm days come in a garden store, time is up. There is nothing left for preparation. It is just strap yourself in and ride the roller coaster of spring planting. Can the candidate overcome the obstacles and meet the deadlines for success at green garden gates?
"When I was a young boy, I lived in a small farming town in
Next to our house was an old vacant weedy lot that was on the crest of the hill. I paced it back and forth and decided that I had just enough room to run the length of it. I cut away the brush and made a crude little pathway. I found some old boards in my dad’s garage, sawed and hammered together a couple of supports and carefully measured and placed long nails at intervals on the supports to hold a crosspiece between them.
My dad and I talked about my big plan. He went to the hardware store and bought me a huge long thick wooden curtain rod for my “pole”. I got out the paint and candy striped it red and white. My dad asked of his buddies from the mill to dump a load of sawdust at the lot and I shoveled the next three days moving that pile into my pit to make a soft landing. I gathered thin little pieces of long wood, put one of them across the supports on the nails, walked back to the end of my path, faced my creation, ran down the path and hurled myself over the crosspiece, falling onto the soft sawdust. I was hooked! All that hot summer, I was at the lot, alone in that little patch of weeds, just me and my candy striped pole, staring down the line at that strip of wood hanging high in the air.
But, I soon ran out of those little wood crosspieces. One miss and they would break in two. I looked way down over the hill into the backyard of a house. There they were, a treasure of hundreds of those little strips of wood in a pile! I would climb down the steep hill and across the meadow and carefully sneak into the backyard, grab an bunch of them and run back up to my pole and my sawdust pile. Every time, I missed and broke the wood, I thought of that long climb back over that hill. I learned fast how to get over that bar without breaking the wood!
That autumn, I went to a large school in a big city. I was the all city high jump and pole vault champion. The other boys laughed with me. The pretty girls smiled at me. It all was because of that vacant lot, my candy striped pole, and a pile of sawdust.
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