Gather feedback
Just as you need to be talking with employees and customers to make sure your vision is clearly in place, you need to be out in your organization speaking with them to understand your business and whether the evolution of your vision is really meeting the needs of your customers. The final piece of communication is asking for feedback.
“If you’re in tune with your business, you’ll see things changing or modifying … that it’s time to reinvent your vision or to make some modifications to it,” Stack says. “You need to be aware of your surroundings and what’s going on in your business and what’s going on with your competitors and what’s going on in the marketplace.”
Stack uses that face-to-face time in the stores to really get a grasp on part of that equation, and it’s something he encourages all of his managers to do, as well.
“You need to talk to your customers, because without customers, you have no business,” he says. “You need to have information firsthand to understand your business. Your customers are the ones you’re trying to serve, so you need to get out there and talk to them.”
While in the store, Stack approaches the customers and asks them about their shopping experience to try to solicit feedback. You don’t need to make a grand to-do about who you are or what title you hold. Simply ask questions to understand how customers feel about your company — more specifically, what they think you’re doing right and wrong.
“What service are you not providing that you need to provide to keep those customers?” Stack says. “You can’t be afraid to hear bad news.”
Along with the customers, you need to be gathering information from those on your staff who directly communicate with the customer. Ask them what the customer is saying about your business.
“We’ve been able to create a level of trust with our associates out in the field that they are confident telling me or telling other members of my management team when things aren’t right,” Stack says. “They’re not afraid to deliver bad news. They know we’re not going to shoot the messenger.”
It takes time to build rapport with employees, but it’s something you need to do. The best way to build that trust is to show that you’re actually listening, that you appreciate their input and that they won’t be reprimanded for sharing negative information.
“You talk to them, and you listen to them,” Stack says. “Then you act on their suggestions or you come back and communicate as to why you can’t, but the communication doesn’t end when you leave. You can send the message to them that you value their opinion by fixing the problem that they have or you come back and say, ‘I understand your issue, we cannot make this change and this is why.’ After you’ve done that for a while, they get to understand you, they get to trust you and others on your management team. They’re only too willing to tell you what’s going on in the business as long as they know there aren’t going to be repercussions. We’ve developed that kind of a relationship.”
One of the ways in which Stack developed that relationship was by implementing a fun and engaging process that Dick’s dubbed the “stupid list.” He met with his store managers, told them to go back to their stores, share the idea with their staff and submit through e-mail three things they felt needed to be changed. No topic was off limits.
“I think it’s really simple,” he says. “Ask people for the things that you have them do that they view as not adding value. We did it as a fun thing.”
Gathering the feedback is just half the battle. The second part is analyzing. When you’re gathering information from so many places, you are not, obviously, going to be able to act on every decision.
“We looked at the 10 things that our associates indicated the most,” Stack says. “If somebody said, ‘This is a stupid thing,’ and we heard that 50 times and something else we saw was stupid but we got that three times, we went with the thing that we heard more.”
Don’t try to tackle the concerns and ideas presented by employees on your own. You need to involve individuals with firsthand knowledge of the reason for the process. Stack took the ideas deemed stupid to the management team that executed that portion of the business.
“If it has to deal with your buying group, you go talk to the people in your buying group and say, ‘These are some of the things (the employees) viewed that we’re doing wrong. How can we change that?’” Stack says. “You go right to the source and put somebody in charge of making those decisions.”
Once the decision is made, you need to follow up again with everyone and explain what decisions were made and why. Stack follows up with verbal and e-mail communication.
Remember, the purpose of gathering feedback is to better understand your company and find ways to help your staff execute on ways they can better serve customers.
“It’s a great educational tool for the CEO to see what truly is going on in the business,” Stack says. “I’ve tried to make sure that I’m not insulated from bad news, but sometimes people don’t want to tell the CEO bad news. This is a great way for you to get right into the heart of the business and see what’s right and what’s wrong.”
How to reach: Dick’s Sporting Goods Inc., (877) 846-9997 or www.dickssportinggoods.com
