This feature first appeared in Inside Retailing Magazine. Click here to subscribe.

In this exclusive extract of Retail is a University by Peter James Ryan and Gerard Manion some of the key learnings from Australia’s most successful retail figures are revealed…

There is no doubt that the critical lesson for retail revolves around people management – both internally and externally.

Customer relationships and staff relationships make or break your business.

 
In the first instance, all of the retail leaders we talked to were very focused on the customer and continually pointed out that without the customer, there is no business. Showing genuine care for the customer, listening to them, meeting their needs, “surprising and delighting them” and building relationships based on going the extra step because you care are some of the elements they referred to in regard to a general “focus on the customer.”

What they didn’t say was “the customer comes first”.

There is a very good reason for that. Retail leaders understand that retail is about a whole of business approach where a myriad of things must be attended to without over-balancing into any one area. Most rejected the cliché “the customer comes first” as being at best naive and at worst misleading. They argued that in the people management of retail businesses, if they put anyone first it would actually be their internal people. While Roger Gillespie put it most succinctly when he said, “You can’t do it on your own”, the 10 interviewees see the second part of the people management equation revolving around internal people skills.
Building the right team, communicating with them and leading them are part of the skill set for managing people. If you don’t get that right you can’t serve or delight customers and you can’t keep refining things to be better than your competitors.

Showing your staff the same “genuine care” for them as people as you do your customers helps to build deep bonds of trust and facilitates a sense of mutual benefit that leads to better performance.

This really leads straight to the central theme of personal integrity. While they all used their own words and clearly had this belief at the centre of their being, from John Ilhan’s “old-fashioned values” to Carla Zampatti’s “genuine caring”, personal integrity is a core and fundamental part of a retailers’ value to their business enterprise.

There is no doubt that business savvy plays a major part in retail success and that retail professionals need to possess it or hone it as a skill. Knowing when and how to act are lessons that are learnt by experience and often embedded as unconscious competence.

Unconscious competence is a deep knowledge that has been learnt on so many levels and so well, that it becomes second nature and appears as intuition or reflex.

As Carla Zampatti says, “Learning on the job is so powerful. It happens on many levels – on both a conscious and subconscious level. You feel it. You experience it. You really understand it. You learn in such a way that you’ve almost forgotten all the stuff you know and just at the right time you can make a decision”.

Retail is not a game of perfect. It is a game of continual improvement.

Peter Ritchie speaks of the old adage “Ready. Fire. Aim”. In retail overthinking, over analysing and waiting for perfection often mask a sense of fear. In retail, you do and you learn. You are committed to getting it right and getting it better through doing – not talking about it. And you never give up. As Lesley Gillespie said, “there’s always a solution.”

In retail the positive energy you gain from the fun, the people interaction and the adrenaline rush from always being “on”, is spent in the commitment to getting it right and never giving up. For Lesley this is as close to obsessive compulsion as a healthy person can get.

You must have un-fathomable depths of passion, energy and self-belief in retail because there are always problems to solve and new hurdles to jump. Retailers have to be flexible and always focused on the need to re-invent and refine in the quest for improvement.

The great truism in retail is “If you aren’t always moving forward, the thud you hear in the back of your head will be the sound of your competitors marching over the top of you.”  It is relentless.

Every day you have to do the business, review the business, improve the business, fix the issues and produce better results.

This requires attention to detail, a personal commitment to making a difference, a whole of business approach, expertise, experience, teamwork and the ability to enjoy it and have fun doing it. None of the people we interviewed would rather do anything else as a career than be in retail. Retail has taught them the fundamentals of business in a hands-on manner that prepares them to be capable of transferring those skills to any other industry. It has also taught them a great deal about themselves.

Looking inside
If you genuinely are a people person and have as a part of your make-up a strong sense of personal integrity, a genuinely caring nature and a drive to be better, you learn from every interaction and every action. It never stops. You learn every day.

You examine yourself because your ability to add value is directly related to your ability to improve yourself. All our retail leaders have this trait and they have learnt, not to second guess themselves, but to have an attitude to “be better each time”.

Consequently one of the major lessons each has learnt about themselves is that they are problem solvers or have become problem solvers. In the “always on” world of retail, there is never any shortage of issues to attend to – often at a moments notice.

These people, en-mass, are quick and decisive at summing up an issue and determining what needs to be done and how – right now!

They just “feel right” inside from deeply held experiences. They don’t know they are absolutely, positively right. But they feel confident enough to be decisive and keep being decisive. This is part of the DNA of retail. Keep moving.

They also never rest on their laurels and are constantly aware of what is going on around them. As Gerry Harvey said, “At my age and with my financial situation, I don’t need to work. I do it because I love competing and getting better.”

Every day is a new day in retail and every day you start with an attitude of “this is going to be my big day”, as Carla Zampatti puts it. You are driven to make it better and learn more as you get older.

As Stephen Tindall suggested, “When you are young, you don’t know what you don’t know. Later on, you know what you’re looking for. Then you go and seek it and apply it.”

So what did our retail leaders impress upon us as learnings?
• You learn the power of communication and leadership and how you need to get better at both of them.

• You learn you are a good salesman – either at selling products or your company or ideas or all of them.

• You learn business savvy – commercial judgment.

• You learn not to be afraid of mistakes but to learn from them and not repeat them.

• You learn you are tenacious and persistent and you will never give up, because you are in it for the long haul. Because you can achieve anything you really want as long as you’re willing to put in the hard yards to get there. And you do put in the hard yards because you love retail.

• You learn to blur the line between business and pleasure and to take a great deal of pleasure from retail.

• You learn to constantly look at yourself objectively and discover your strengths and weaknesses – playing to your strengths and finding talented people to cover your weaknesses.

• You learn where you are weak and need good people around you.

• You learn that your genuine interest in people has transformed you into being very good with people – customers, staff, suppliers, peers.

But above all you learn that your values and personal integrity are what defines you. John Ilhan used the phrase “do unto others” as part of his personal credo and that is something we see in great retail leaders the world over.

What makes retailers learn so much about themselves is that a retail career is a journey of self discovery and self improvement, not in isolation but, surrounded by peers and colleagues who are going through or have gone through the same thing and are sharing it with you and giving you feedback in the most collegiate way.

Retail is a constant source of true 360 degree feedback and experiential learning that removes the subjectivity and politics and allows you to be comfortable and confident it what you are learning about yourself.

The 10 people we interviewed were confident, high-achievers all extremely competent and skilled and yet were firmly grounded people who had a genuine desire to be good human beings.

Retailers learn best
Gerry Harvey is not one to hold back. “Many people today would be battling to get to first base in most industries because they haven’t got a university degree. Well that just goes to show you what a lot of crap the university degree is. Experience in the job is so much more important and being passionate and dedicated and good at it. A university degree is really no advantage.”

And Gerry went to university. Privately some of our interviewees raised some concern with a sense of the societal and political over-balance into tertiary education as a cost of entry to many professions. In isolation, they argued, a university degree is not a determinant of retail or business success. You don’t need a degree to get into retail.

As Stephen Tindall put it, “In retail you’re into the real stuff on day one. You get all the training you need to do the job, but it’s on the job.”

On the record many pointed to the fact that the retail industry lacked social standing because of its lack of a universally recognized tertiary qualification.

There was however, a clear distinction between social perception to elevate retail as a career choice and the commercial reality of actually doing the job.

All our interviewees agreed that being a good retailer is shaped more by what you experience and learn on the job than what you learn in any classroom.

Theory is one thing, but execution is quite another. The various forms of learning in retail are more immersive and experiential and hence deeper.

Most of the best retailers talk glowingly about the way they are given scope to try things and learn through doing and seeing results.

As Jonathan Pinshaw put it, “In retail you do things and you get positive or negative reinforcement”. It helps that retail is so immediate, that cause and effect are very transparent.

This is not always the case in other industries. All the interviewees are very much in agreement about the joy of and need to learn in the job in retail. Tertiary degrees are not a cost of entry for a very good reason in retail. There is no university degree that prepares you for a career in retail.

Having a degree does not put you ahead of the guy who has spent the same time you spent studying in university, actually doing the job. As Peter Ritchie pointed out, he envied the embedded retail knowledge that both Charlie Bell and Guy Russo had acquired by forgoing university to concentrate on “in the job” learning.

Great retailers have unconscious competence. Some find it difficult to articulate why something will or won’t work. They just know. This comes from the kind of learning retail affords even the youngest employees.

But Lesley Gillespie, Carla Zampatti and Peter Ritchie all made the point that you don’t blindly hand over responsibility to someone who isn’t capable of dealing with it.

Great retail businesses offer the growing retail student competency and skill-based training, mentoring and step by step “do and learn” opportunities as they “blood” the next wave carefully and responsibly.

They do take on a personal responsibility for not wrecking someone’s career by allowing them or pushing them to do something beyond their capabilities too soon.

McDonald’s is often quoted as the best training company in the world. It has a mixture of e-learning, class-room learning, in workplace learning and rotational position learning that allows great scope for employees to learn every aspect of the business or to specialise.

One of the great things about retail is the constant stream of decisions – mostly short term – that need to be made. This means, from the earliest days in a career in retail you are making choices in a low risk environment. Its spontaneous nature forces learning but as Lesley Gillespie pointed out, there isn’t a single way to learn. Retail recognises this. It allows people the flexibility to learn their way. It encourages people to be driven to learn and to see the personal and business rewards that come from the application of their learning and improved skills.

With its transparent nature, it is clear to everyone who is putting in the extra effort to be better because their results speak for themselves. Retail is a results-driven business and learning fuels improvement. Bernie Brookes put it this way, “People who want to improve themselves and their position go out of their way to learn, to get feedback and be seen to learn. These are the retailers who will be successful because they go out of their way to learn. I see that as part of making your own luck.”

And it never stops. From the moment you enter a career in retail to the moment you retire, you never stop learning for a moment.

Peter James Ryan is chief navigator of Red Communication, while Gerard Manion is executive director of TodayCorp, parent company of Retailstar. Click here to order book