4 Responses

1. establish best practice
   Hi Alex,

   I generally try to establish what ‘best practice’ is for the area managers. In the past I did this by organising a half day meeting and did various exercises such as negative brainstorming and affinity diagrams to establish the need to haves and the nice to haves and then compared this to what they know already and organised to fill the gaps. Equally you have the information ready for a development plan for new area managers as well.

   Hope this helps

   Stuart

2. Field Manager LNA
   Thank you for the advice Stuart. Much appreciated.

   Alex

3. Best Practice into Action
   Hi Alex,

   To further build on Stuart’s comments – engaging your retail managers in what is expected of them, in order to establish best practice is a great first step. At that early stage, it is also worth inviting them to consider what additional skills will be needed to enable them to overcome future business challenges.

   Having outlined the skills and needs of their role, these can then be developed into pragmatic competency statements grouped under core headings. This doesn’t need to be an expensive or time consuming activity. There are many competency lists out there that you can map against with ease (let me know if you can’t find one and I’ll forward you ours).

   Finally, having worked out ‘what a great job’ would look like, you can then invite the team through self reflection to identify their current strengths and those aspects they should further develop. Alternately, you could turn your competency statements into a 360 degree feedback tool which would provide your managers with some individual, clear feedback on their current performance and development needs and provide you with a summary overview of group learning needs. Again, with the advances in online technology, building a 360 feedback tool does not need to be an expensive/ complex/ time consuming activity and can be achieved for an ‘all in’ cost of less than £100 per head

   Best of luck
   David
   davidcooper@lumus.com

4. Mapping against competencies worked for me
   Hi Alex

   In a previous organisation where I managed a team of retail area managers I used MAP Assessment to benchmark them against core competencies. My team were all assessed together in one day and then a group feedback session took place on a different day.

   This proved really useful because it clearly highlighted the individual’s strengths and development areas and it provided us with a group report that helped me to plan long and short term team development.

   The MAP Assessment also looked at their preferred management and communication styles, this information formed the basis of an interesting session on how they interacted with each other and their teams.

   Overall a very efficient and cost effective way of getting a lot of information with the added bonus of some team building.

   The website is: http://www.mapassessment.co.uk

   Good luck