You Are a Role Model
By The Mann Group
Actions speak louder than words. Remember that principle when it comes to the way you interact with your employees and your customers.
As kids, we were subjected to a host of parental idioms that we can easily transfer to the role of manager: “Treat others as you want to be treated,” “Always say ‘please’ and ‘thank you,’” “Practice makes perfect.” But there is one maxim that many managers are wont to follow—much to their employees’ detriment: “Do as I say, not as I do.”
Whether you like it or not, as a manager, you are a role model. In fact, we’d argue that is your primary role; more than payroll or schedules, buying or invoicing, the impact you have on your staff is integral to the everyday and overarching success of your business. What makes it a little frightening is the fact that it is a role you are required to play constantly.
Many managers make the mistake of assuming they’re only training their employees when they say they’re training their employees, but training isn’t a hat you have the privilege of taking on and off. You aren’t just training when you present a lecture on a new product or demonstrate the best way to merchandise apparel—you’re also training when you’re behind the cash wrap, when you help a customer track down a gift, and even when you duck into your office to avoid that picky patron.
Although your every move is subject to observation, and therefore, as a manager, emulation, it’s the moves you make with customers that most impact your staff and your business. It’s customer experience, more than price or product or anything else, that defines a successful retailer. And great customer experience begins with you.
Every interaction you have with customers isn’t just an interaction, it’s an example to your employees. Every word you speak and gesture you make in a customer’s presence is observed by your employees and, whether intentionally or not, slipped into their ever-growing bank of resources titled, “Ways to Interact with Customers as Exemplified and Approved by My Boss.”
So when you thoughtlessly slip past a customer without a greeting on your way to a meeting, or when you let your frustration with a late order impact the way you interact with a customer who wants to buy it, your employees innately add those actions to their own internal field guides.
And that’s why it’s so dangerous to incorporate any thought process even remotely resembling “Do as I say, not as I do” into your managerial experience. You’re not a parent who can awkwardly justify their bad habits with a shrug and a phrase. Your employees aren’t kids who will voluntarily heed your words and forget your actions. These are adults; they’re stubborn, but they’re also impressionable, and they will hold just as tightly to your poor examples as your positive ones, no matter how many times you verbally suggest they do otherwise.
Your role, then, is to be the perfect model of customer engagement. Greet every patron, engage genuinely with their questions and feedback, offer honest recommendations, smile, demonstrate your impeccable manners, go the extra mile and make their dreams come true—do it all because every customer matters, but do it all flawlessly because your employees are watching. When they observe you exemplifying the perfect approach to customers, they’ll have no excuse to do otherwise.
We guess there is one more idiom you can incorporate into your managerial catalogue: “Actions speak louder than words.”
About The Mann Group: We are The Mann Group, a charmingly incongruous and blatantly genuine group of big thinkers and list makers. Get us together, and our ideas bloom into vibrant, sky-high projects; take us apart, and we work methodically and assiduously to accomplish the goals we created together. We create and implement practical courses and curriculum to help businesses and individuals grow.