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The findings in our Key Challenges Facing Leaders in the Retail Sector report are based on discussions with coaches across five continents and 33 different countries, working for retailers across the grocery, fashion, cosmetics, healthcare and luxury goods sectors to name just a few.
According to Mindbeat’s global network of coaches, retail leaders struggle with long-term planning, innovation, collaboration and professional development. Our Partnerships Director, Simon Morris looks at each of these challenges and asks how coaching is helping retailers to reframe their thinking.
Retailers have made a stuttering start to the 2020s. The turn of the decade brought with it excitement and optimism that artificial intelligence, virtual reality, augmented reality and increased swathes of customer data would transform the way we shop, presenting retail leaders with enhanced opportunities for personalisation and technological innovation both in-store and online.
However, the pandemic, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, political instability, rising inflation and supply chain issues have all taken their toll.
Retail leaders have had to fire-fight and adapt rather than innovate and grow. Leadership skills such as recruitment, staff retention and strategic investment have all suffered as consumer behaviours evolve and retail experience expectations shift and continue to change.
In its Retail Trends report for 2023, Deloitte believes that retailers are now ‘finally ready to get out of first gear’ – highlighting the importance of strong, effective and empathetic leadership to capitalise on the tailwinds of opportunity still blowing through the retail landscape.
“Leadership is a theme that runs throughout all our trends, whether it is making strategic investments or decisions on cutting costs to unlock value, ensuring your business stays focussed on the customer experience in the face of extreme challenges, pushing your net zero agenda or transitioning to a skills-based organisation. However, leadership is not just demonstrated in the boardroom. To be successful, retailers will need employees across their organisations to step up and demonstrate leadership traits.” Deloitte’s Retail Trends 2023
With these words ringing in our ears, we spoke with those Mindbeat coaches around the world who work with retail leaders and their teams across the grocery, fashion, cosmetics, healthcare and luxury goods sectors.
They gave us the four most common challenges they’re helping retailers navigate and the leadership initiatives they’re encouraging clients to implement. Let’s look at each in turn.
Almost 90% of our coaches report that retail leaders lack the ability or head space to think long-term. This remains a hangover from the Pandemic when reactive decision-making and short-term survival trumped longer-term strategic planning.
Junior leaders in particular still find themselves caught up in immediate, day-to-day issues and feel constrained by a focus on KPIs and quarterly results.
Leadership coaching centres on effective delegation, setting aside time for planning and reflection, fostering a team environment conducive to individual growth, and ensuring that everyone can perform at their best.
Almost 60% of our coaches say that retail leaders are avoiding experimentation and innovation due to organisational views of failure. The association between financial rewards, bonuses, and promotions often casts failure in a negative light, discouraging individuals from taking risks.
When organisations do encourage innovation, the crucial element of trust is often missing, leaving leaders fearful of the ramifications associated with perceived failure.
Organisations that prioritise talent retention are often more inclined to embrace a culture of ‘failing forward’ and risk-taking. Leaders are coached to create workplace environments where making mistakes is acceptable, provided there’s an open dialogue around growth and learning through trial and error and a demonstration of trust from the top down.
Over 60% of Mindbeat coaches agree that retail leaders tend to operate within silos and lack the ability or motivation to collaborate across boundaries.
This is mostly due to organisational cultures that prioritise competition over collaboration. There is also a disconnect between headquarters and store-level managers, which can leave stores understaffed or under-resourced.
Our coaches highlight a need for more retail organisations to establish formal processes that promote collaboration and foster a learning culture, facilitating the exchange of ideas and insights. The transition from functional management to cross-functional leadership demands that leaders focus on enhancing their abilities to influence, build internal and external stakeholder networks, and encourage collaboration.
Some 97% of Mindbeat coaches report that retail leaders struggle to find time for their own personal and professional growth. While 84% say that retail leaders lack sufficient time to invest in their team’s development.
Coaches see leaders who are stuck in an ‘it’s quicker if I do it myself’ mindset, those who report the absence of a supportive culture that encourages dedicating time for self-improvement, plus many who grapple with issues relating to employee retention, often addressing development needs reactively rather than through a strategic approach.
Retail leaders use coaching to develop accountability, set boundaries, serve as role models, and boost confidence. They’re encouraged to consider the strategic implications of their own development, employ creative time management, and delegate effectively.
Retail leaders who make time for thinking longer-term by anticipating threats and developing an organisational culture that encourages risk-taking, self-improvement and innovation will reap the benefits.
Developing more collaborative and cross-functional leadership skills such as confidence, establishing boundaries, setting up high-performing teams, engaging in honest conversations, tailoring a leadership style depending on the audience and developing stronger networks, will enable retailers and their teams to face a more assured future together.
To read the full report or to discuss Mindbeat coaching for retail leaders and their teams, please email [email protected].
Mindbeat’s head of client and product development, Jessica Bellwood discusses a medal-winning strategy for keeping performance high and teams focused through to the end of the year and beyond.
As the leaves turn and the days get shorter, organisations are turning their attention to the final three months of the business calendar and how, in particular, teams are set up to achieve year-end goals and surpass financial or performance-based targets.
It’s a challenge often made harder by hybrid working arrangements and 24/7 digital connectedness, which have introduced more workplace distractions than ever before.
Countless teams will underperform and businesses will suffer this quarter due to our inability to focus on a single task for the time required to get the job done properly.
According to one recent poll of 1,600 employees and managers, more than 60% admitted that they rarely do even two hours of focused work each day without distraction.
So how do you keep your teams focused and year-end objectives firmly in the cross-hairs?
As an athletics fan, I’m excited about next year’s Paris Olympics. But I already know that the long-distance running medals will go to those athletes who set a steady pace for themselves from the off, conserve their energy for when it’s most needed, and then give it their all to finish on the podium.
In business, the last quarter is your sprint finish. So, to be in with a chance of winning Gold you need to understand at what pace your team has been running, how much energy they have left in the tank and then find a way to tap into those reserves for a strong finish.
Start by bringing your team together to review priorities so that distractions don’t creep in.
Then, help them to agree on the best use of their available energy. Who needs to be directly involved and whose time could be better spent in a more supportive or administrative role? How will you measure success on a daily, weekly or monthly basis to ensure your team stays on track?
Making the last quarter count is all about ruthless prioritisation so that you remove roadblocks to team productivity and invest time and energy only in those tasks with the greatest payoffs.
You can’t expect every member of your team to have the same laser-like focus as an Olympic athlete. But you can help them shut out everyday distractions so that they feel more in control and less overwhelmed by what’s left to achieve in the year.
As neuroscientific research shows, the key to achieving huge team goals is to have the right skill sets in place to execute collective action, while optimising individual focus, task control and working memory capacity.
One way to encourage focused work is to put it on the calendar. Empower teams to block out certain days or times of the week for focused work.
During these hours, no one (including you as team leader) is allowed to schedule meetings or interrupt workflow.
Notifications are turned off, phones are put away and unrelated emails go unanswered.
Our brilliant Mindbeat coaches talk a lot about learning to say ‘no’ well and avoiding ‘switch-tasking’ (or multitasking as I’ve always known it).
Encouraging staff to say ‘no’ well is about normalising a workplace culture in which employees understand their priorities and feel able to express themselves if they’re feeling overwhelmed or can’t move outside of their prioritised lanes.
Avoiding ‘switch-tasking’ is about everyone’s collective understanding that spinning plates at work makes you less productive and reduces the amount of working memory available for the one task that could really matter.
Instead of giving it their all, if your team is juggling requests and flitting between meetings, emails and the task you’ve asked them to prioritise, they’ll only provide a fraction of their aptitude for something that could make all the difference between end-of-year success or under-performance.
For many businesses, the last quarter of the calendar is the most important one as success or failure will shape the outlook for the year ahead.
By formalising individual focus and team priorities while having the right support in place, not only will you make the last quarter count, but you’ll also set yourself up for success of Olympic proportions in 2024 and beyond.
Talk to Mindbeat about how our network of expert coaches can help your teams remain focused and prioritise success.
Did you know that group coaching is now even easier on the Mindbeat platform with our improved scheduling tool?
Participants can simply register and choose the dates that work best for them, which removes any back-and-forth or diary clashes.
Arranging three-way sessions between the coach, participant and Line Manager has also been made more seamless. Simply agree on a date, select the session type and the Mindbeat platform will connect everyone automatically.
“Having a technical team in-house means we have the scope and capability to continually develop our platform,” said Mindbeat’s Head of Coaching and Co-Founder, Joanne Payne. “We continue to refine our approach and improve our product to ensure we deliver the very best working environment for our fantastic coaches.”
Mindbeat is privileged to offer a global network of expert coaches. In the first of a new series of interviews to introduce you to our much-loved coaching personalities, Mike Fletcher talks tomatoes, training and playing the accordion with Søren Holm, who lives in Sweden.
Søren Holm brightened my day even before he began to speak. Admitting him to our Zoom call, the 66-year-old former vice-president of the International Coaching Federation (ICF) appeared on my computer screen wearing a fuchsia-coloured shirt and holding a beautifully crafted accordion.
“I’ve been trying to learn how to play this instrument ever since my wife bought it for me 15 years ago,” he confesses. “I keep picking it up, learning a bit but then leaving it alone for too long so I have to start over.”
It seems the business of coaching leaves little time for accordion playing. After our chat, Søren will need to dive straight onto another Zoom call with a new client who wants him to develop a career progression programme for future female leaders. He then has a one-to-one session with a female mobile communications executive based in Iraq.
“It’s a huge privilege to coach people of different nationalities, backgrounds and cultural characteristics,” Søren says. “My background is in behavioural science, so understanding different cultural traits and seeing how different people learn and grow is fascinating to me.
“I once had a spate of coaching candidates from The Netherlands, who are thought of here in Sweden as being very direct and outspoken. I found out through our coaching sessions that they felt pressure in business to live up to this national stereotype of being forthright, when in fact many of them were much more introverted.”
Søren’s coaching strengths lie in his ability to listen, ask considered questions and provide the much-needed space required for candidates to develop new thinking that leads to growth.
He admits he’s never had a coaching specialism but in an increasingly noisy world, his calm and amiable style must be a welcome breather from the turmoil of the corporate workplace for any level of employee.
“The whole point of coaching is to help someone move in the direction they want to go. It doesn’t have to be more complicated than that,” he says. “I talk with people on an equal footing, which is rare in any profession as usually there’s one person who’s the expert or the authority. I listen, we talk and I contribute perspectives that help shape their thinking.
“It’s not about getting them to move – it’s about helping them figure out where they’d like to get to, what’s preventing them from getting there and how you navigate the roadblocks.”
Søren now lives 100 km from Stockholm but grew up in Denmark and spent three formative teenage years living in the US. He coaches in Danish, Swedish and English but can also get by speaking in German, Spanish and French.
By his admittance, he’s ‘been around the coaching industry a long time’. In fact, he’s believed to have been one of the first professional coaches to have operated from the Nordic region – although he’s quick to acknowledge that it’s a claim he finds hard to substantiate.
He did however help to launch the ICF’s Nordic Chapter and has served for five years on the ICF global board, helping to drive the organisation’s growth throughout Europe. In 2022, he was inducted into the ICF’s Circle of Distinction.
Søren was almost certainly the ICF’s first Nordic member though and considers himself a pro-typical early adopter of not only the discipline of coaching but most things in life.
“I’m not sensible enough to wait for second or even third generations of technology. I have to be among the first to get my hands on the latest Apple product or experiment with new gadgets,” he says with a laugh.
“I like to keep up with new thinking in behavioural science too. The last 15-20 years of data-driven research into personalities is so different from the traditional Jung and Freud ideology taught in the early Eighties. I subscribe to newsletters and extracts of research papers and receive a bunch every day that I read and find interesting. Some people stop learning as soon as they leave school. I just love learning and understanding new things.”
Søren rarely travels to coach in person these days, partly because he’s grown more conscious of his carbon footprint and ‘no longer wishes to fly’.
Virtual coaching suits him anyhow. His original training to qualify as a coach was conducted over the phone with a US company, long before video conferencing came along.
“Through Mindbeat, I can now meet candidates across the globe from the comfort of my own home. I do one-to-ones and group sessions involving line managers and team leaders so that we can work through appraisals and everyone from an organisation has bought into a thoroughly planned out process,” he says. “The advantages to meeting and talking to people face-to-face are so small that they’re outweighed by the practicalities of being able to coach and receive coaching online from wherever you are in the world.”
In theory, the absence of travel that comes with virtual coaching should afford Søren at least evenings and weekends to continue teaching himself the accordion. I get the impression though that he prefers to spend quality time with his grandchild as well as outside with his keen gardener wife, tending to his tomato plants.
“When I finally retire, I’d like to grow tomatoes semi-professionally,” he says. “It’s the visual appeal of all the different colours, sizes and shapes – you just can’t buy anything like organically grown tomatoes in the supermarket and they certainly don’t taste the same.”
Still, just as learning and growth development occur over time with the right coaching programme, the same commitment and patience that Søren already shows his tomato plants will see him one day become an accomplished accordion player, I’m sure of it.
Perhaps the next time we meet online, he may even play me something – I do hope so.
Mindbeat’s head of client and product development, Jessica Bellwood discusses the importance of strategic onboarding and reveals plans for new research into attrition.
After weeks of trawling through CVs and interviewing candidates, you’ve finally landed your perfect hire. You made the right choice but what happens next will determine if that individual flourishes within your organisation or, like around 40% of recruits, decides to quit within a few months.
It’s a commonly held belief that finding and recruiting a new employee takes 40 days on average and costs businesses upwards of 35% of an employee’s annual salary. So seeing new hires resign, in the knowledge that you’ll need to start over the recruitment process, is both a huge time waste and a financial migraine that all companies could currently do without.
The first 90 days in the life of a new hire are therefore crucial.
Since the pandemic, companies have spent too much time and energy on knee-jerk responses to headline-grabbing trends such as the ‘Great Resignation’ or ‘Quiet Quitting’ and not enough on ensuring that their onboarding strategies are carefully planned and fit for purpose.
The consequence is high attrition and new employees left ill-prepared to understand their roles within teams, navigate team dynamics, and even indoctrinate themselves into the new company culture.
Onboarding, or helping new hires adjust to social and performance aspects of their jobs quickly and smoothly, is the very first building block for better retention, efficiency and overall business performance.
Programmes vary across those organisations that do it well, with some offering complex and detailed ‘assimilation’ frameworks and others providing checklists and coaches to help analyse workplace situations and prospects for new employees.
According to the Society for Human Resource Management, onboarding best practices can be distilled into four Cs – Compliance, Clarification, Culture and Connection.
Compliance is the policy-related rules and regulations you’d expect to learn about when starting a new role. Whereas, the other three focus on how a new starter gets to grips with all related expectations around their role, how they settle in and how they establish interpersonal relationships.
Here at Mindbeat, we talk a lot about an additional C – Confidence.
Let’s look at the levers you can pull as an organisation to keep attrition rates low by actioning these Cs, plus how coaching contributes to building stronger employee engagement and commitment during someone’s first 90 days in a new job.
Ensure that employees understand their new job. If expectations are ambiguous, their performance will suffer.
The role of the hiring manager is key to ensuring that the job description is an accurate representation of the ‘actual job’.
Around one in four people say they left a job because it wasn’t what they had expected. Provide clarity on both the day-to-day role and what success will look like in their first three months.
A welcoming and open company culture will encourage new hires to help themselves during their first 90 days by making time to chat with colleagues, mixing socially, participating in company activities and displaying proactive behaviours such as asking questions and seeking feedback.
An external or in-house onboarding coach will discuss how the individual fits in socially and facilitate questions and appraisals with line managers.
Line managers play an important role by helping newcomers adjust to their new workplace environment and by providing feedback, advice and further opportunities for learning and development.
This also helps employees build trusted relationships with their line managers so that once the 90-day onboarding is complete, the Connection bond is made.
Just as you were confident that you made the right choice when hiring, it’s paramount that each recruit quickly establishes self-confidence to aid their performance.
Self-efficacy has been shown to have a significant impact on organisational commitment, job satisfaction and even turnover.
A coach will help new hires prepare for their onboarding orientation even before they start by bolstering self-confidence and helping to overcome any challenges individuals may be encountering.
Developing the coaching skills of line managers and using an onboarding coaching programme are vital for keeping new hire attrition rates low, so long as they’re offered as one element of a larger plan, have total buy-in from management, and are done in conjunction with the little things – like senior leadership taking new employees out for lunch and team leaders ensuring their first day is a positive one.
With organisations increasingly unable to afford the spiralling cost of high employee turnover, and more than half of exiting employees surveyed by Gallup admitting their managers could have done more to prevent them from leaving, effective onboarding will be a key retention strategy for the foreseeable future.
It’s something that here at Mindbeat and out in the coaching field, we’re keen to track and share insights on, to better understand the impact of how company strategies evolve.
With this in mind, we’re currently conducting research on new hire attrition and approaches to onboarding. If you’d like to take part and share your organisational insight, let us know and we’ll be in touch.
In the meantime, reach out and talk to us about how our coaching network can help improve your new hire experiences.
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