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"Walking every aisle is a new practice for store bosses in her area, implemented by their regional manager. It helps managers “see what your customers see,” say
by havaloc 3y ago
"Walking every aisle is a new practice for store bosses in her area, implemented by their regional manager. It helps managers “see what your customers see,” says Hart, and pay attention to details. It also keeps her employees on their toes."
I can't believe this wasn't policy already. Seems like good practice.
- newsclues 3y agoI had a great manager that did similar things. His education was the navy and he ran a store like a ship, and everyone loved it.
- damidekronik 3y agoWould honestly love to know more. What activities which are not common for a store did he bring from the navy?
- insensible 3y agoYou’d probably enjoy the book Turn the Ship Around about a Navy submarine captain who transformed a low-performing crew into a strong, cohesive, autonomous crew.
- HeyLaughingBoy 3y agoCompany I worked for gave us all a copy of the book and made us go to a 3-hour presentation by the guy. I was not impressed!
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- newsclues 3y agoHis style of leadership was what a good captain should be. Kind, caring, patient with everyone but also personally set and expected a higher standard. Mistakes were opportunities to learn, and you never felt belittled. He was the kind of person that was the first to show up and the last to leave and knew every part of the business as if he had done it, and was busy but always had time for people and knew there names. He was a leader not a manager or supervisor, a trait I’ve found common among military people. He took cleanliness and safety seriously from the navy and applied that to the store, the store staff vacuumed and cleaned the store as it was his and we took pride in it from top to bottom and he lead workplace safety efforts very early on. He ran the store like a family, and he shined his boots every morning.
- BenjiWiebe 3y agoThinking back to one manager I had that everyone loved for similar reasons, and I remember now that he had a military background. I never thought then that it might be connected.
- jpm_sd 3y agoSounds like the depiction of Gus Fring as manager of Los Pollos Hermanos.
- newsclues 3y agoI think that is high praise.
- tr_user 3y agolike a family is normally not praise
- icedchai 3y agoThis would be like asking the average corporate "software development manager" to actually look at the code/product developed by his reports. Except for early stage startups where the person is truly in a player/coach role, it rarely happens.
- outime 3y agoOr making developers run the app/website on average laptops/phones that users commonly use, rather than on the most expensive MacBooks/iPhones.
- skydhash 3y agoI have a 2011 mac mini I'm using as home server. It had Linux Mint for a time (this year) and it was snappy, except for browsing the web. Everything else work fine, even LibreOffice and playing videos. But load youtube and you can see the stuttering.
- TMWNN 3y agoMarissa Mayer, while at Google, kept using dialup at home so she would experience what someone without broadband sees.
- givemeethekeys 3y agoHow'd she go from that to messing up Yahoo?
- sandspar 3y agoAnother way to put it is how she became CEO of Yahoo at age 37.
- givemeethekeys 3y agoI think one can definitely progress to becoming CEO of a large company by 37 if they make a lot of right moves, which I'm guessing she did. But yeah, to go from being the kind of manager that walks the aisles to the kind that regressed a bunch of great products - it seems like something broke along the way.
- loceng 3y agoAkin to the golden rule of "use your own product."
- bookofjoe 3y agoEat your own dog food.
- userbinator 3y agoMS popularised that, but based on some recent comments here by employees, it sounds more like they're just getting force-fed the dogfood without having any power to change it.
- wmoser 3y agoYou would think so. I was working on an oil rig and they made a big deal about ‘management by walking about.’ So the heads of each of the departments were supposed to go and check ONE job their charges were working on that day. They were supposed to write a short report about what they observed. This was too much for them so they quickly got in trouble from shore-based management for not filling out their reports. So they promptly delegated to the next-in-line management They promptly delegated it to the people doing the work so once a week besides all the other paper work I had to fill out a report about how I was observing myself working safety while management still had no clue what was happening.
- bee_rider 3y agoThat’s sort of different stakes, right? In your case your direct managers decided to prioritize not doing their jobs over some pretty important stuff—your personal safety and the damage the oil rig could do to the environment if something went wrong. In the case of walking the floor in a store it is just aesthetics mostly.
- throwaway2037 3y ago> In the case of walking the floor in a store it is just aesthetics mostly. To be clear, when you wrote "aesthetics" do you mean (a) presenteeism (seeing the boss) or (b) cleanliness/tidiness of a retail store?
- bee_rider 3y agoB
- throwaway2037 3y agoThank you to clarify. Then why did you write "just"? In one reading, this is slightly dismissive. In retail spaces, cleanliness and tidiness is very important for the shopping experience.
- bee_rider 3y agoI don’t really understand what this looks like. I mean, when I worked in retail, I was at a place smaller than Walmart, so, maybe Walmart managers tend to be more hands off and need to make a show of actually knowing what’s going on in the store. But I’d typically get some instructions and then be left to clean up or stock things. Tidying up isn’t that complicated or high stakes. Normal people know what messy and clean look like. My favorite managers were aware of what the store looked like and could say “tidy up the pillows” or whatever if something needed particular attention. But the manager that came by with attention to detail and an intention to keep me on my toes? Nah, that’s annoying. And even in a pretty small store, there are a lot of aisles to tidy up. If a manager is known to be annoying they’ll also have to waste time looking for me.
- simantel 3y agoA Walmart Supercenter can have 500 employees and dozens of deliveries per day. I can totally see why they'd get wrapped up working mostly in the office and talking to department heads vs. walking the store.
- throwaway2037 3y ago> My favorite managers were aware of what the store looked like and could say “tidy up the pillows” or whatever if something needed particular attention. But the manager that came by with attention to detail and an intention to keep me on my toes? Nah, that’s annoying. I'm confused. What is the difference? It sounds like "eye of the beholder" kind of stuff, like micro-management vs high touch.
- throwaway598 3y agoManagement by wandering around https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Management_by_wandering_around https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Management_by_wandering_arou...
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- nitwit005 3y agoThis is one of those things everyone will agree is extremely important, and which they then won't do when assigned the job.
- riffic 3y agowalking the gemba
- dclowd9901 3y agoI think it probably has good efficacy if the walks are infrequent. Familiarity tends to have a negative effect on observability.