Everyone from the top to the bottom should understand what a good store manager does to keep the operation humming.

By Fran Duskiewicz

For the first 10 years or so that I worked for Nice N Easy, I spent most of my time on the road with store managers—training, opening stores, creating programs, whatever it took to help them.

I might have been in the office one day a week. Founder John MacDougall wasn’t around much either, because he’d be working with franchisees and scouting opportunities. We’d talk on the phone and grab a beer when we could, but we didn’t really get much face time. When I wanted to see him in person, I always knew where to go, however.

John franchised a store to his wife, which was smart. His job at the family- owned Nice N Easy was to open up every Sunday morning. He would put the Sunday papers together, make the coffee and man the register to take care of his Sunday regulars. I’d stop by Sunday mornings and we’d visit. Sometimes I’d get pressed into making coffee or hopping onto a second register.

It was fun.

THE SHADOW KNOWS
Our mindset as a company was always store manager-centric. Without excellent managers running those bad boys, we simply couldn’t execute our plans. Our goals and aspirations would only go as far as our managers could take us. So, we treated them like gold.

Our office staff understood that and did likewise. Many of them came from stores. However, that became more problematic as we grew, and more people were hired without store experience. They knew their jobs and were good at them, but they didn’t understand the store manager’s job and that was a problem.

Many companies now require office and field personnel to spend a certain number of days working within a store and I applaud that. The very first thing I would require them to do is be a “shadow manager” for at least three days. Workers need to understand what our managers experience at store level.

Office people may perform valuable functions that might cover a large number of stores, but their responsibility could also be narrow and they usually answer to only one person. Store managers have to deal with almost every office responsibility and, in many cases, deal directly with the staff member who needs to get something done efficiently or handled……now.

Unfortunately, the person in the office might not have a clue to what the store manager deals with all day, every day. That’s why they need to assume the role of shadow managers before anything else.

The shadow manager would be at the manager’s side for at least three days. He’d deal with vendors— each of whom has been promised something that probably couldn’t be fulfilled. He’d have to deal with employees’ demands and write a schedule that required calculus and algorithms to get right, and, oh yeah, also deal with the consequences when that carefully written schedule fell apart.

NO REST
Moreover, the shadow manager would hear non-stop calls from the office and deal with an email inbox filled with too many emails to read; some were rather nasty.

At the end of the day when the staff usually went home and could separate themselves from their jobs for a while, the shadow managers were required to keep their cell phones close at hand in case they had to respond to something quickly.

If the store managers received a call from the store, which they do all the time, the manager would call his or her shadow manager to discuss the issue. If that call required the manager to schlep back to the convenience store for any reason, the shadow manager would go, too, even if the manager needed to fill in on a midnight shift.

This requirement was not to punish office staff, but rather to help them gain some perspective on what the person at the other end of the phone call or email is experiencing. It was to make them realize that they should do whatever they needed to do to help ease the burden a bit, including going directly to the district manager or operations team to assist them.

A shadow manager’s role provides valuable on-the-job experience, which might be all it takes to change attitudes in the long run.