your development resources richer, better and more effective.
Benchmark the best demonstrated practices of your best team
members, and incorporate that insight into your training materials. Teach everyone something new every shift.
Recruit strategically, not generically. Seek talent where
it gathers, and aim for people who are already motivated and
wired to succeed. Instead of just participating in local high school
job fairs, sponsor or recruit from the school’s National Honor
Society or Link Crew. Align your company with a local Boy
Scout troop and recruit from the Order of the Arrow honorees
(Scouting’s National Honor Society). Look for affable, eager and
self-directed people from these groups that you can develop into
tomorrow’s superstars.
Don’t recruit or train to yesterday’s competencies.
Identify and detail the top five performance-based criteria necessary to be successful in every position in your club. Determine what
average performance and what stellar performance looks like for
each role. Develop your current teams to be proficient in those key
performance-based criteria. Now look two years down the road.
What skills may be critical then that are only peripheral now? For
instance, if you have two general manager candidates with similar
expertise, I’d promote the one with proven social media savvy and
technology-enabled training skills.
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Jim Sullivan is the author of the Amazon best-selling book,
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get his training product catalog at Sullivision.com.
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GearedUp | 2016 Issue 3
Assess your ABCDs. Consider all the nuances of the four
levels of employees. There are two kinds of A players. An A player
in a B company is likely to be a B player in an A company. They will
work down — or up — to the talent that surrounds them. There
are two kinds of B players. One is someone who is a B player in the
overall retail marketplace, but they could be an A player (or even
a C player) in your company depending on your talent pool. An
organization can also outgrow A players. For instance, an A-level
Area Manager in a $3 million company can quickly regress to a C in
a $50 million company if their skillsets don’t grow. C-level managers
don’t hire A-level team members. They hire D-level associates
so they look better as a manager. As author Brad Smart says in
“Topgrading:” “C players suck the creative energy out of your organization. They fail to prevent problems and then can’t fix them. A
tremendous amount of your time is wasted undoing what C players
did or doing what they should have done.” There are two types of C
players: one who can be developed into a B and one who will only
ever be a C. Know the difference.
Simply put, your most competitive strategy going forward is
out-teaching the competition and doing so with habitual consistency. It is cheaper to train than it is to recruit. Consistency in
operations is the most effective marketing strategy. Consistency in
hiring, training and development is the most effective profitability
strategy.
Every day that we spend not improving our people, performance and products is a wasted day. G
THANK
YOU
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