Store Manager Terry Francona

Normally I don't share any current articles from my daily subscription  newsletter The Daily Retail Experience here on the Retail Contrarian blog. But since my beloved Red Sox won game one of the World Series I decided to celebrate by sharing Tuesday's Daily on what we would say about Terry Francona if he ran a retail store. I hope you enjoy the article......even if you're a Rockies fan.

As you can imagine, baseball fans all over New England are flying high with the Red Sox victory in the American League Championship Series that sends them on to the World Series. Being a superstitious Red Sox fan, since I didn't write anything after they won their division or during the LCS I figured I couldn't write anything until the series was over.

Besides spending $143 million dollars in payroll, one of the reasons the Red Sox are so successful is manager Terry Francona. While a lot of people might say that anyone can be successful with a $143 million dollar payroll, the Yankees, Mets, and a few other teams will tell you otherwise. You have to have a good manager to win.

Believe it or not there are a lot of similarities between running a store and running a baseball team. Part of being a successful manager, whether it is in baseball or retail, is knowing how to leverage the capabilities of each individual on the team and get them to work together to achieve a common goal. They both require strong leadership, confidence, and strong communication.

Since Terry (aka Tito) Francona is a good baseball manager, he'd probably be a good retail manager too. Here are four things we might say about Terry Francona if he ran a store the same way he runs the Red Sox:

1. His store team works hard for him because they appreciate his ability to balance the needs of the company with the needs of the staff. People like the fact that he "has their back." The employees know that he's not afraid to share with his bosses how the staff feels about company issues but they also respect that when he rolls out company initiatives they know they are expected to be onboard.

2. Tito is known as one of the best at finding each employee's strengths as well as what motivates them to bring out their best. Terry was surprised at a recent manager's meeting when a colleague said that since all his retail associates do the same job he doesn't see any reason to look for employee's strengths. The manager said as long as every employee is meeting expectation what sense did it make to assign employee "specialties."  Tito knows better.  One of his employees, the one they call Big Papi, is awesome at creating big-ticket sales.  Since the staff knows that they appreciate it when Big Papi steps in and helps them with a customer who is clearly making a big sale.  He's got another employee, named Yuk (pronounced 'Yooooook"), who is very patient, so Tito assigns him tasks that frustrate other employees.

3. Terry knows that practice makes for better retail associates. Roleplaying on a daily basis is standard in his store. Not a day goes by that Terry doesn't spend a few minutes with each employee practicing some service or sales skill.  Not surprisingly, Terry's store has the best mystery shop score in their division.

4. Tito looks for coachable moments instead of depending just on monthly one-on-ones. Sure, monthly one-on-one meetings are nice to do, but Tito learned early on in his career as a store manager that giving people immediate feedback was critical to developing an employee.  New employees are always surprised at how much feedback they get from Tito.  At first employees think that maybe he's a little too critical of them but the come to realize that Tito doesn't label the feedback as positive or negative, it's just feedback. They realize that Tito's only motive is for them to grow as an employee and a person.

So while Terry Francona is gearing up for the start of the World Series, your World Series, the holiday selling season, is just one month away.  Is your team getting ready? Even more important, are you doing what you need to do for your team to win?