Turning Your Cards Into a Winning Hand

I was talking recently with a retailer in my mentor and coaching program who said she seemed to be having "one of those bad weeks."  Among the contributing factors was that her best employee had just given his notice, one of her top lines was picked up by one of her competitors, and the anchor in the center where one of her stores is located has gone out of business.  After going through the list we both agreed that she was lucky it was only "one of those weeks" and not "one of those months."

We commiserated for only a minute or two and then agreed that she needed to move past her current thinking.  I even challenged the notion that she was having a "bad" week. Maybe her week was actually a good week.  I reminded her that more often than not the difference between a good week and a bad one is your perspective.

I told her the story about my daughter learning to play poker with her cousins a few years ago. Jane seemed to catch on pretty quickly and even won once or twice in the first hour. After a while, though, she wasn't doing so well. At one point she came over to me to complain that she wasn't doing well.  I looked at her cards and she had drawn an ace high straight.  Jane thought because she didn't have a pair or three of a kind that her cards were bad. Once she learned to see her cards differently she started to win more.

The same thing happens to us. We're dealt something at work or home we immediately view as bad but if we look at it from a different perspective it may not be so bad at all.  I told a friend of mine this story and he said, "You're right. After I lost my job when my company downsized I had more time to look for a better job."  Obviously my friend is a smart aleck and was trying to say that I was being a little Pollyannaish.  I got the last laugh when two weeks later he landed a great job he never would have gotten if he hadn't been downsized. Okay, I did luck out on that one.

If you're going to run a successful business or store you need to be able to play the cards you are dealt and turn them into a winning hand.

That's just what the retailer I was talking with is doing.  The best employee who gave his two-week notice is leaving retail so this gives the owner a chance to promote another up-and-coming employee.  To get this person trained she is going to have another store manager be a mentor to the new manager.  This is a perfect scenario since the owner is considering promoting the store manager to an area manager and this will be a way to try her out in the new role.

She also realizes that her competitor picking up one of best lines is actually a good thing. When she thought about it she realized that the competitor has a lot more foot traffic, is only carrying a limited selection, and offers sub-par service.  So instead of moving out of this product line she is going to increase the number of skus and advertise it more.  I think this is a winning hand!

And in regard to the anchor going out, well there's not a whole lot she can do about that. She is going to meet with the store team and hopefully together they'll come up with some ideas to drive traffic.  And who knows, maybe they'll get an even better anchor.

So let me ask, are you turning your cards into a winning hand?