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Your staff inventory and 2014 development goals

January 7, 2014 by Doug Fleener — President and Managing Partner, Dynamic Experiences Group, LLC

Hello again and Happy New Year!

Just as a healthy business needs to conduct a regular product inventory, companies like yours, which depend on people to drive and deliver an extraordinary experience, should also complete a staff inventory.

It's important to understand what your staff does well and what they can do better. And it’s important to take that knowledge and then put into place plans to become even better in 2014. This week is a perfect time to do that, and this exercise will guide you through the process.

Create a sheet with four columns, either on paper or with a spreadsheet program. List your staff's assets in the first column. These are the behaviors and actions your staff regularly displays that meet or exceed your expectations.

Examples:

• Strong product and industry knowledge
• Great at proactively engaging customers
• Passionate and dedicated to the store

List the staff's improvement opportunities in the second column. These are the behaviors and actions you know your staff can and/or needs to improve. While a few could be behaviors and actions that failed to meet your expectations, most are likely to just be areas in which you know they can improve.

Some leaders struggle with this exercise because they equate "improvement opportunities" with "the team is doing a bad job." That's not the case at all. It just means you just want to see even higher performance in these areas. The items listed in this column could be key to growing or maintaining your sales and profits in 2014.

Examples:

• Needs to focus less on task and more on sales and service
• Improve our ability to convert more sales and increase average sale
• Timeliness has been an issue for some of the team
• Only one associate truly clienteles

In the third column, list your 2014 Staff Development Goals. These are actions that you potentially will take in 2014 to grow and develop your staff. These actions might come from improvement opportunities in the second column, but they could also be based on the strengths you enumerated in the first column. For now, just create general ideas. Over the next month you can reshape them into specific initiatives with dates, deliverables, etc.

Examples:

1. Get the customer and his/her experience to be everyone's number one priority. Not sure if this is a program or training, but I know it has to start with the management team.

2. Implement a new sales training and/or approach in the store by March 1st. We have to increase average sale or conversion. 

3. Relaunch our customer clienteling with new expectations and accountability.

In the last column, list YOUR 2014 Self-Development Goals. These are actions that YOU as a leader must take in order to help achieve the goals you enumerated in the third column, that will enable your company and staff be more successful in 2014.

Examples:

1. Invest more time and focus on developing my staff. I have to make the time to meet one-on-one with every employee on a bi-weekly basis.

2. Stop accepting underperformance in certain areas. (Like clienteling) I let things slide that are too important to our business to ignore.

3. Make the customer experience and staff development as my top priorities. I need to delegate more so I can increase the amount of time I spend working with the staff.

I love this Jim Rohn quote: The future is always more exciting when we’ve created a plan and designed how we’ll be successful. The plan is always changing and evolving, but it has to start with a defined plan. I also know that future success is the result of strong leadership, coaching, and moving your staff and business to the next level.

So let me ask, are you ready to face 2014 with apprehension or anticipation? Your plan of action will determine your answer.

About Doug Fleener

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