Why Retail Leaders are So Damn Quick
Two words: mental acuity
Okay, wait, real quick.
I’m joining a panel discussion next week, and you’re gonna be into it.
Retail Roots: How Store Floor Experience Shapes Leaders
Amiright?
This super cool brand, ENDVR, is hosting a chat about how retail prepares you for leadership positions throughout your career. Come celebrate retail leaders with us and stay until the end for a Q&A session.
Can’t make it live? That’s okay. Sign up now and catch the replay later.
Note: This edition of The Voice of the Frontline is a re-issue. I absolutely love the topic of mental acuity, but it just isn’t discussed enough.
Read this if you’re a retail leader applying for a new role or churning through interviews right now. It will help clarify the complexity of what you do every day and how to articulate it.
Cheers!
Ringing up a customer and running a sales floor simultaneously sounds bonkers. There’s no way a person should be able to engage in a conversation with a customer in front of them, take off sensors, scan barcodes, fold, listen to a conversation over a walkie, watch the front door, hand a sales associate keys, watch for erratic behavior, and maybe even answer the phone.
But I’ve done it thousands of times.
When a rush hits your store, and you need to cashier, you help cashier. You act.
Being a retail leader requires a wild skill set. It’s often hard to define what makes us so versatile and dynamic. But these two words do a pretty good job: mental acuity.
The book The Attributes by Rich Diviney is now my go-to legend for the language about human behavior. The book breaks down core attributes that we all have to varying degrees. Some of us have more grit, and others have vision or social intelligence. We can work to increase these attributes, which helps explain why some people are more empathetic or influential than others.
Attributes you’re born with; skills you learn.
So, back to mental acuity. Retail leaders have significantly developed this attribute. The longer you work on the retail floor, the more you build your mental acuity. Diviney breaks mental acuity into five parts.
Here’s how they relate to retail.
Compartmentalization
The ability to effectively chunk an environment or situation into meaningful pieces, then focus on that which needs immediate attention.
Sound familiar? Retail leaders do this ALL DAY.
We scan the floor, see which customers are new and who needs help, and check out the cash wrap line, the fitting rooms, and the shoe department. In about five seconds, we can tell who may need our help, who is being productive, and who has gotten caught up in chit-chatting.
Then, we move. We go where we are most needed at that very moment, and then we leave the rest. We understand the second most important area of the store, so we’ll go there next.
We do this so much that it becomes innate. We don’t think about it. We go.
Discernment
The ability to observe details and make accurate judgements.
Every day I walked into my store, I would walk the windows. A mannequin needs accessories, the floor is dirty, or shoes have become askew. Mmmhmmm - someone was in a hurry and didn’t follow up.
If I went into the shoe room and boxes were on the floor, I knew they’d had a rush or the shoe person wasn’t coming back to clean up.
We see these little clues all day long, and they paint a picture of how the store is running. That’s why when I visited other stores, I could tell pretty quickly how they were operating. If shipment was stacked up or the back room was a mess, I knew the store needed work.
Learnability
The ability to absorb, process, and apply new information to a current or future context.
In retail, we learn something new almost daily. We receive new brands or items. We listen in on conference calls. Sometimes, our sales associates call out with some far-fetched excuse.
New information comes to us quickly, so we learn quickly. There’s no time on the retail floor to study. We see it, we hear it, we learn it, we go!
Situational Awareness
The ability to absorb and process meaningful information about our current environment.
Yep, absolutely. When someone new walks through the door, I can tell who’s in a hurry, who has a return, and who’s looking for the clearance section. I can tell you who may need directions and who is waiting for a ride.
I can also tell you who may be looking to steal. So can all of my retail leader friends. We watch behaviors all day long so we can tell when something is out of place. When you’re with people who are really good at this, it looks like they can predict the future. They’re so good at situational awareness, noticing what’s around them and acting on it; they appear to be fortune tellers.
Retail leaders are very, very good at this.
Task Switching
The ability to shift focus between tasks or contexts.
Retail leaders spend their entire day task-switching and reprioritizing. Task switching is how I got so good at watching the floor, ringing a customer, and answering the phone. This attribute is crucial in retail, and leaders are so good at it that when they venture into other industries, people think they’re an anomaly.
Nope, retail leaders are just like that.
The mental acuity we cultivate is essential to running the business well. It’s also what people in other industries don’t understand. They tell us, “You’re not qualified to work here. You’ve never seen this software, used this tech, and you don’t have a degree in whatever we’re asking for this month.”
Maybe not. But we do have:
Compartmentalization
Discernment
Learnability
Situational Awareness
Task Switching
Which is probably way more important than that degree, anyway.
So, hire a retail leader, watch them learn your business like lightning, and then run circles around your current team.
You’re welcome.
Kit Campoy is an author and retail expert with 20+ years of experience leading retail teams. She thrived on building relationships with customers and motivating sales teams. Now, as a ghostwriter, she leverages this people-centric approach to craft compelling content that resonates and ignites brand loyalty.
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So glad to see this again! Those skills laid out in detail are vital to be remembered.