Lead with Your Retailing Knowledge

Do you make use of opportunities to lead by sharing your retailing knowledge with your staff and to have your staff members share their knowledge with each other? Here’s a reminder from Making Money Is Not Illegal, Immoral or Fattening:
     “You have some very smart people working in your business and other businesses where you know the people. How many of the very smart people who really do understand the business are willing to stand up in front of the group and share the knowledge that they have? Are you willing to do that? There are retailers who say, ‘I learned the hard way, and I’ve been in this business like for a thousand years. The others need to learn the hard way, the same way I did.’ And even though they’ve been in retailing a long, long time, they are still the amateurs. Let’s all be professionals. Let’s teach others what we know. Let’s educate them, and then let’s work with them together.
     “Another angle on this: If you’ve been in retailing for let’s say, twenty years, do you have twenty years worth of learning or do you have one year of learning repeated twenty times? Amateurs absolutely stop learning. They think that because they’ve been at it for twenty years that they’ve a vast amount of experience. When you start talking to them, though, you find out how limited their knowledge is. They really have one year of experience repeated twenty times.
     “Professionals show leadership in ways that energize. Now, I’m all for constructive criticism. What did we do right, what did we do wrong, and what do we need to do to fix it? Let’s go down the road and fix it. It does none of us any good if we fail to get the problems fixed.”