How To Be A Better Manager
Here’s 3 tips that can really make a difference.
We all want to do our best work, but sometimes it can be difficult to know what to do to achieve that best work. Thankfully, We Card is here to help you become a better manager with 3 simple and impactful pieces of advice that will improve your abilities and make your retail location more efficient, effective and compliant!
1. Know Your Stuff
It may sound straightforward and obvious, but managers need to know the ins-and-outs of everything pertaining to your business. How best to display products, food safety, responsible retailing, you name it – The more you know, the better equipped you are to deal with any challenges you'll face, no matter how common or how rare. In the case of underage tobacco, vaping and nicotine pouches product sales, completing We Card’s Manager Training Course will improve your subject matter knowledge and make you a more responsible manager.
2. Sharpen Your Coaching Skills
Everyone makes mistakes, including your employees. But it’s crucial that when mistakes happen, they are corrected and learned from to make sure they don’t happen again.
Employees learn the right way things are done during training, such as in We Card’s Employee Training Course, but managers must continue to review and reinforce these teachings as employees transition to work behind the counter. The best ways to do this are through positive reinforcement and constructive feedback.
Positive reinforcement helps to instill your values while building your employees’ pride in the work they do. Encourage employees when they do the right thing (from jumping in when a team member needs help or when they deny a sale to someone attempting to use an expired ID), but also remember to reinforce why what they did was good – that helping out makes everyone’s job easier or that denying sales to people underage keeps your store compliant with the law.
And when an employee does something the wrong way, provide constructive feedback in the correct way: Calmly explain what the employee did wrong, what they should have done instead and why it’s important to do it that way. When you don’t walk your employees through these steps, you can end up inadvertently reinforcing the wrong behavior going forward, which can put you and your store at risk.
3. Build Consistency
You can have the best of intentions, but without consistency, it’s often difficult to succeed. Practice makes perfect, as they say. In order to get your employees to do the right things - or stop doing the wrong things - you have to be consistent.
Do products have to be displayed in a certain way? Then model that behavior in your own work and make sure to provide that constructive feedback consistently when an employee fails to display that behavior correctly. And similarly, remember to provide that positive reinforcement when they do things right!
You can continue to hone these skills in the We Card Manager Training Course, which includes a Training Notes PDF – a handy tool complete with recommendations, actions you can take and articles to read.
With these skills under your belt, you’ll be a manager ready to take on anything! For more information on We CardTraining Programs – including front line employee, refresher and manager training – visit www.wecard.org.
