Whats the best way to identify learning needs for a small team of retail area managers? David Cooper of Lumus gives his advice.

David Cooper replies:

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.

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. Alternatively, 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.

Stuart Farmer advises:

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.

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Field manager learning needs analysis
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