My First Management Role

It was 1998, and I’d just been promoted to my first manager role. I’d been an Assistant Manager for a couple of years, but was thrilled to be taking on my first Manager role. It was for Black’s Cameras, one of Canada’s largest photo retailers across the country. And I had been given an opportunity to manage a small store in Scarborough.

This store hadn’t been performing very well, with all of the metrics that were being used. Not that it was the worst, but it certainly wasn’t one of the best. It was also in a part of Toronto that wan’t known for being a very affluent part of the city. Quite the opposite.

But none of that is the point of this. The point is that I wanted to do a good job, and validate that I did deserve to be the manager of this camera shop.

I did a couple of things that, looking back, I’m really proud of. I also did a whole pile of things that I’m not really proud of. In time, those really helped me learn. But I’m going to talk about the two things that I’m really proud of for the moment. These came to mind as I’m helping create a leadership workshop for a large enterprise. And these two things came naturally to me for some reasons. No one told me to do them, I just did.

1…

The first was that I didn’t set goals for my staff. Weird, I know. Every other manager was setting goals for the employees. How many cameras, extended warranties, loyalty program cards, each was expected to sell. And it made sense – all of the Store Managers, including me, had a Regional Manager setting goals for us to achieve in our stores.

But I didn’t do that. I actually sat down with my staff, and individually talked to them about how many shifts they were going to work each week (we had a pretty consistent, but rotating, schedule). And I asked them how many of each of these thing they thought they could contribute to the store’s sales (in effect: my targets).

When they gave me a number for the month, I asked them to break that down by the week, and by the number of shifts they worked. For some of my part-time staff, did the really think they could sell one camera every shift, or would one every three shifts be more realistic? Did they really think that when working four shifts a week, including our busiest day each week, that they’d really only sell one camera for the entire month?

Once they’d landed on, what they felt was a realistic goal for themselves, I’d thank them for that, and ask what I could do to help make sure they achieved that goal. In some cases, it was learning about a new camera, or about when something might be in stock, or about a question they could ask to help them sell the loyalty card when someone was picking up their photofinishing order.

Month after month, they collectively arrived at a number that far exceeded the target that had been set for me by my Regional Manager. And month after month, we delivered, as a store, against that result. Usually, there’d be one person who didn’t make their target, but the others in the group more than offset that one (or sometimes two) who missed.

2…

The other thing I did was to set store goals rather than individual goals. When there was a promo or incentive available, I’d set a store goal.

I remember having one conversation with one staff member who said “This is stupid, Jeff. I could hit my goals, perform perfectly, go above and beyond, and if the others don’t do their part, I’ll get nothing.”

And I remember, even this early on in my career, thinking ‘it’s not about you; it’s about us, as a team’. I’m pretty sure I said something like that to him – that as a strong performer, one of the things he can do is to help others develop. Share his knowledge, skills, and expertise with them. He didn’t last long working at my store. The funny thing was that, in hindsight, he wasn’t nearly as good as he thought he was. Don’t get me wrong – he almost always delivered his results, or came pretty close. But never supported anyone else in the store. And even back then, I was more interested in building a team.

And now, today in 2020…

These values still hold true for me. I’m interested in what people think they can do, challenging them to push themselves, and then supporting them in achieving their own results. I’m interested in building a team, where the whole really is greater than the sum of its parts. I wish 20ish years ago that I’d been more aware of what I was doing. Nice to look back in hindsight and understand why I did some of the things I did.

And, it’s funny to see some of these things I did as a photography retail store manager are still applicable and valuable in the completely new corporate enterprises I find myself in these days.