What Managing a Retail Team Taught Me About Leadership (and Myself)

I’ll never forget my first day in retail.. As I was walking with the person who hired me into the office to get my online training started, she said “don’t be nervous buddy” to which I replied - “no i’m not nervous… I'm actually just really cold, the aircon is strong upstairs”.

Fast forward two and a half years later, I am in the same office discussing my future potential as a department manager within the store after many years of hard work and passion.

I always had an initial opinion before I had ever stepped foot into the retail industry as to what the scope of a retail manager may be like and I can tell you it is definitely NOT what I had expected.


One of my first challenges I faced as a retail manager is the fact that not everybody in my team is necessarily on-board to give it everything they’ve got in the workplace. When I was a team member, I used to perform all my tasks to the best of my ability and make it a goal to ensure I never leave work with left-over tasks that were assigned to me. It made me realise that I’m going to have to step outside of my comfort zone and have the types of difficult conversations with these people in particular to get them onboard with their work. The worse they work, the worse my management experience is. At the time I had no issues doing this because I was always good at addressing poor behaviour. 


This led to my second challenge.. It was underperforming team members- more specifically, team members that were trying their best and had a great attitude, just they weren’t meeting the benchmark of performance. This circumstance is what always left me confused on how to act. Obviously with appropriate coaching and determining the root cause was a first step, however that didn’t necessarily always produce results. In my honest opinion, some people just aren’t cut out for the expectations of life in retail. As businesses grow and expand their operations, the budget becomes tighter and tighter to the point it starts to affect stores. Some supermarkets suffer more from this and I strongly believe ours HAS. As a result of this, the expected performance of each team member is incredibly high and for some just might not be achievable. 



The worst part about all of this? Upper management is cut throat and BRUTAL about performance. They don’t care about the whys or the hows, they just expect the job to be done regardless of the circumstances all because that is what the business has told them. 



This now leads to my third challenge. Clashing management perspectives and values. Even though I am a manager, I have my own line manager as well which would be the store manager. I have had a couple in the past but this one has polar opposite values to me. 

I’ll never forget one morning when we were walking around the shop as he was critiquing negatively about how bad things were from the fill team of the night prior and he said “If I was the manager of this department I would be ringing your team asking why this why that”. The only thing I could think of in my head was thank you for the advice but I wish to be NOTHING like you in the past, present and future. 

Moments like this really opened my eyes as to what kind of manager I am. I’m the kind of manager that wants to do well by the job and by the team I handle. I would never compromise one for the other under any circumstances. Working in retail is heavily about providing for customers, but it is also about providing for a comfortable, safe and positive work environment for those who work for you. Some managers get so lost in performance metrics and barrages from their own bosses that they forget how to treat their own team.

To me, being a manager is about taking care of people, ensuring they have the right resources, training and work environment. Working with the team, leading from the front are both my modes of leadership. To be someone with such values needs to be utterly resilient in the workplace since these values don’t strongly align with business-oriented upper management. 


This is all merely the tip of the iceberg of how retail management has shaped my values and taught me a lot about myself. 

For all of those out there that have managed a team before, did it uncover things about yourself that you did not know?