Sharing more from my learnings in the first 3 months as these were the make or break months. This section focusses on staff management as a huge part of my learning & development was and is still today in this area. Effective staff management comes through hard work, it is difficult at times as it is a huge adjustment and a lot of learning … a lot of trying and check what works and what doesn’t work and not taking things personal
From Corporate to Entrepreneur – sharing my story & learnings
3) Getting down to business
- Quarter 1 – key learnings (Part 2)
So what was the learnings for the first 3 months? Continued
6) Staff management: One of my greatest and most valuable learnings in the first 3 months and in the following months were around staff management. Remember, previous to this I managed and lead 7 Sales Managers who was responsible for 72 representatives. Now I was responsible to lead and manage the 5 ladies at the shop. Three ladies working in the kitchen and 2 ladies working in the front shop. The best way I could describe this … it was a huge challenge and it developed me to another level!
I found that there are a lot of similarities in staff management between
my previous role in Corporate and my new role in my small coffee shop: Here is
a list of those; Setting clear expectations and ensuring every-one is well skilled
on what to do and how to do the job. Agreeing on acceptable behaviour within
the work place and towards each other = treating each other as adults, with
respect, honesty and transparency. As always it is important to understanding
that the majority of people want to take pride in what they do and they want to
be successful and then … only a few people don’t really want to be there and is
not a fit to the environment / the job and would / need to eventually leave
I also found a couple of
differences in staff management between my previous role and my new role own
business (coffee shop):
A)
Staff circumstances was different as
people were reliant on public transport (taxis), which in its own is not
reliant. This resulted in staff being late on some days with no pre-warning.
Resulting in an impact on the business as some days the shop had to open later,
close earlier and putting unnecessarily added stress on colleagues. Initially I
would have staff not pitching at all for a day or come in hours later, without
any notice of where or what happened, just to pitch next day or later to say transport
issues. This was a major uncontrollable stress factor in my day to day working
life in the first couple of months
Key Learning: For me it was important
to focus on what was in my sphere of influence … what I could control and what
was important to me. So
what I did to manage this and my stress levels was to decide what was important
… for me to know what was going on and whether some-one was in fact late or
not. Then I could decide on action for the shop around moving staff and
adjusting times if needed. Agree with staff that if they had issues with
transport or any other that they need to let me know and discuss it … if they
don’t have airtime send me a call me back. This was something for the staff to
get used to as some of them just did not want to adhere to this … to big a
change, and some abusing the system … not always the transport that was an
issue. In the end all my staff bought into this, this worked well in the almost
3 years I had the shop resulting on less stress on me as well as the staff and
less impact on the business
B) Staff levels of expertize and exposure different: Coming from a background of working in Corporate I realised every day we do take so many things for granted. I found that amongst these ladies sometimes unsatisfactory work was due to lack of knowing better, or just not knowing and not having experience/ exposure to something. I had to go back to basics and often introduce basics as there was no reference.
Key Learning: Invest a lot of time in training, up skilling and understanding your staff, their individual personalities, their circumstances and experience is it always pays off and is worth it. This taught me a lot of patience … if you think you have a lot of patience … this experience will show you, you still need a lot more. For me it was important when something happened in the shop to Breathe take a walk and then come back and address it when I have cooled off. Remember you just cannot react and talk to people when you are upset within your business … remember this is your bread and butter so it is personal and you will react accordingly … resulting in no way forward, no learning and cultural & interpersonal misunderstandings.
Important you should always be flexible and treat every-one according to their personality type and experience, but when it comes to what needs to be done and the requirements here you need to be inflexible and consistent
For more tips and guides on staff management go to http://www.madtrainingsolutions.co.za/business_basics_staff.html
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