Teamwork in a Retail Target Operating Model

Building a successful team

Out of the discovery piece we were able to make several recommendations – from reducing the number of reports and making them more action-focused to systems improvements – but there was a bigger piece of work to do to align the senior leadership team and ensure there was sufficient focus on agreeing the strategy in good time.

During interviews with team members from Heads of function to assistants there was clear frustration that plans were being reworked repeatedly, in a lot of detail, often long after any meaningful action could be taken. Trading meetings had become focused on why something had gone wrong – come in late, not been bought in sufficient volume, been carried on for too long – rather than what action should be taken. Participants often felt isolated and emotional in meetings and a lot of energy was expended on non-value add activities.

As we investigated further, from CEO to Senior Leadership Team and into the functional teams we could see that there was insufficient time being spent on Strategy, therefore, the senior leaders were not aligned on a directional of travel before the teams began detailed planning work. Buying and Merchandising leaders were having separate functional meetings, working in silos, and therefore challenges were being addressed by the most junior team members.

Leadership of the Retail Target Operating Model

As part of discovery, it was very apparent that there was extensive and deep functional knowledge in each area but that these were not being well utilised as a team so the initial workshop was to agree a Retail Target Operating Model, a high level process flow of what needs to be done, in what order, by which function and how they need to collaborate to achieve the result. We provided a vanilla operating model and facilitated the SLT and Heads of buying and merchandising to work together on agreeing what their model should look like. This had the straightforward result of producing an aligned operating model, but it also started to build an understanding of the challenges each function faced and the connected nature of all the activities. For example, talking through as a group when the width and depth of the range should be agreed, enabled people to objectively air why options were restricted, what was causing old lines to be flowed too long, why the “rules” were stifling freshness etc. It confirmed our findings, that for this retailer, functional expertise was strong, but collaboration needed improving. By having the SLT and the Heads of buying and merchandising together in the session, it enabled the SLT to hear the impact of an unaligned strategy in a non-confrontational way and opened them up to addressing their challenges.

There is a further piece of work to do with this client on Business Planning Calendar, it’s all very well to agree strategic alignment is needed but how and when is always more difficult, and this came out very clearly on the day. Some of the team wanted to jump straight to this calendar work – that operational mindset kicking in strongly for some – but our recommendation was to spend a day as an SLT thinking through what they needed to do differently.

When functional expertise is high a Target Operating Model alignment can be straightforward but ensuring it is put into practice is more difficult, there will be a reason, or several, why the team does not work in this way already and surfacing that is key to the change. In this case, we could see that SLT behaviours were not being flexed at the different stages of the retail cycle.

At Strategy there should be debate, there should be disagreement, there should be challenge, in fact it is vital that this stage is robust, that we are tough on the ideas (not the person) in order to be sure we have thought the strategy and implications / dependencies through. An SLT needs to build in the time and sessions to have these debates before they get in to the planning stage.

At plan there needs to be alignment, the teams needs to have clear direction to be able to take strategy down into actionable plans.

At buy, move and trade the teams need to have confidence about the direction so that they can make detailed decisions that they truly own. They need to fully understand the strategy so that as results come through, they can learn the right lessons and apply them quickly. And they need to see alignment at the SLT so that they can follow the lead and work together to utilise all the expertise in their team and make good decisions.

We ran a light touch session on the behaviours needed at strategy – light touch because the operating model workshop had raised this requirement so successfully that the SLT were able to call it out overtly very quickly and buy in to the necessity to improve their teamwork.

We then switched into a workshop on Collaborative working and the components of it. HR had previously run a 360 degree feedback survey that showed collaborative working as the biggest blind spot – there was a significant perception gap between how good leaders thought they were at it, versus how their teams felt. We were able to combine the high-level feedback from the survey with our observations and facilitate a session where the SLT worked through a series of exercises to understand the underlying challenges and work through ways to change their interactions as a team.

The results

The CEO invested a full day of his time alongside his SLT to focus on the challenges they have as a team, which underscored the importance of changing the way they worked together. We ensured that the facilitated learning began to build a greater degree of trust and communication within the SLT, no single session will address everything and it will take time to build a highly effective team but they committed to a series of actions and throughout the next set of workshops to address their Business Calendar, Big Decisions and detailed strategy process we will be holding then to those actions and re-enforcing the importance of collaboration and what it can unlock for them. Already we are seeing functional teams which are calmer and more focused, where the emotion is much less of a hinderance and the respect is growing.

Got a similar project you’d like us to work on?

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