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10.27.2005
“HartBeat” is The Hartman Group's FREE online newsletter, providing insight, analysis, information and strategy to give business leaders the knowledge and vision to build sustainable brands.
For more Hartman Group articles on RETAIL EXPERIENCE, click here...
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11.01.2002 "Mom & Pop: What's in a Memory?"
08.02.2002 "The ABCs of Experience"
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04.26.2002 "Sometimes an Experience is Just an Experience"
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StumbleUponRetail Experience On The Front Lines
- VIGNETTE 1: Recently I returned to the Northeast for a family visit. I've lived in Seattle for the last twenty years, but I still think of myself as an East Coaster. Most of my family is still back there, and, well, that's just where I'm from and who I am. But every time I go back, I experience a jolt of culture shock. And one of the main places I experience it is in retail. My first retail encounter on my arrival at the airport was with the car rental woman. I stood there awhile waiting for her to look up from here romance novel, and when I spoke up, she was clearly annoyed that I should interrupt her, I guess, at a particularly good part of the story.
- VIGNETTE 2: I like the people who work at my neighborhood Hollywood Video store, and I like particularly one twenty-something woman, kind of quasi-goth, a quiet, wry person with an edgy sense of humor. She's real. She's comfortable with herself and is a naturally likable person. And it is so painful when I see her mechanically greet each customer as he or she comes in the store. It is so not her to be that way. But she has to do it.
You can't force natural engagement. You can, however, hire people who have it, and my Hollywood Video girl has it in her own eccentric way. But it's not what you get when she greets you at the door. That's a deadening routine for her. She's great when you ask for help or chat with her. She's engaging and funny; she recognizes me as a regular, she's interested in my choices, she gives recommendations about her favorites. But she's not good at the greeting-you-at-the-door routine. Does that mean that she needs to be better trained? No. She doing something she shouldn't be made to do. It's an obvious top down management solution forced on front line workers in an attempt to solve the rude and unresponsive problem that I described in Vignette 1.
Speaking as a consumer, I don't respond well to an employee who greets me because she'll get in trouble if she doesn't. I do respond well to the same employee when we are engaged and communicating. The qualitative difference between being greeted mechanically at the door or being ignored because the worker has something more important or interesting to do is minimal. What's the point? The solution is to hire people who are engaging and real, not insist that they perform some robotic routine. The Durgin Park experience is not primarily about being treated rudely, but about the repartee and being engaged with the people serving you. The problem with the woman reading the book was not her rudeness, but her disengagement.
All politics is local, Tip O'Neill famously said. And so is business, most especially retail. Along these lines, I was interested to read recently in MorningNewsBeat Kevin Coupe's account of Al Carey's talk given at the Food Industry Leadership Center Executive Forum. According to Coupe, Carey, President of PepsiCo Sales said, "I am increasingly worried that the market is changing faster than we are acting." And, according to Coupe, Carey said that PepsiCo is committed to a "servant leadership model" that means "focusing on the person on the front lines as the most important person in the company."
Carey is concerned that by 2010 there will be a 10-million worker shortage in this country. There are going to be very serious staffing challenges, especially on the front lines. Assuming that brick-and-mortar retail stores will have a robust role to play in our future, these are jobs that cannot be offshored. And Carey realizes that the new worker tends to be "disillusioned with big companies, impatient with corporate politics, resistant to a highly structured workplace, and in search of 'cool jobs' with good hours and most of all an acceptable sense of work life balance. And Carey recognizes that "it will be up to companies to adapt their cultures to these concerns and desires, or move down the ladder in terms of being desirable places to work. " They'd be lucky if they get my Hollywood Video girl, who fits Carey's description to a tee.
I, like Coupe, am intrigued by this idea of "servant leadership." This appears to be an upside down view of leadership. Can leaders really be servants? Doesn't being a servant mean being a follower? Isn't the leader supposed to be the bold visionary? Isn't a leader the person who sees the goal and then inspires followers to work toward it?
So what is Al Carey thinking? Is he saying that he's abdicating his role as leader and surrendering to the whim of his subordinates? Not at all. He gets that it's his customers that are at the center of his company's concern, that it's they whom he serves, and the people who are on the front lines of this servant mission are the people at the cash registers and who are stocking the shelves. They deal with customers on a day-in-and-day-out basis. And because they do, they know something that he and the people at HQ don't, at least on a first-hand basis.
So rather than prescribe from on high what they must do, empower them. Give them goals, and let them figure out the best way to achieve them. It's not a new idea when dealing with management level personnel, but it feels a little strange in relationship to the front line worker. Nobody says such a task can be easily achieved. That woman reading her book needs more than a morning training session in effective customer greeting. But the front line here is not only about the employee's engagement with the customer; it's about the company's engagement with the competition. It's going to be the front line in battle to differentiate one retail company from the other. That's what Carey means by moving up or down the ladder.
I like how Carey's servant leadership model refocuses the line of engagement from corporate headquarters to the customer-employee interaction on the front lines. The servant part of his leadership model is not so much about following as it's about listening and learning and finding ways to support staff on the front lines. It's not about developing an ambitious centralized, top-down formulas that every employee must adopt in his interactions with the customer.
The leader's job is still to maintain the big picture, to understand how all the parts work together. It's to learn as much as he can about his customers from his front line workers, and then develop effective strategies that will empower those employees in their interactions with the customers in the stores. It means letting go of some of the control, but it also means having workers who themselves feel more engagement and ownership over what they do. The challenge is to be the kind of store who will attract these employees to want to work for you. Hollywood Video girl, yes. Car rental girl, no.
