| | December 2021MANAGEHRMAGAZINE.COM8In MyOpinionIt's no secret that without strong leadership, even the strongest business strategy becomes unyielding. Effective leaders can help an organisation maximise productivity and achieve business goals, whereas ineffective leaders can hurt productivity and put the health of the business in jeopardy. The same holds for the managers and leaders in the retail space as well. Most retail managers are required to make tough decisions every day, such as employee evaluations, recruiting decisions, and guiding other sales associates to make their own right decisions. They also need to make split-second decisions that could have larger financial repercussions. At this point, a retail manager must find a sweet spot between task direction and people management. While an excessively task-oriented retail manager puts very little effort into the people side of leadership, causing employees to feel unengaged or experiencing lack of development, an overly relationship-oriented manager can fall short when employees feel little motivation to perform. In both cases, the retail store suffers in areas such as productivity, efficiency, and revenue. Thus, retail managers must acquire both task direction and people management skills as per requirement to practice and for leadership. The Succession of Leadership "Every organisation, no matter how big or small, must have a strategy for building the next generation of leaders by creating a strong leadership pipeline." If an organisation doesn't have a strong pipeline of leaders, the company might have to rely only on hiring external candidates to fill the leadership roles. The same applies to retail companies as well. Leadership succession planning in retail must identify capable leaders within the organisation and assess their competencies in managing a certain store with several teams in a demanding position. We, at Salling Group, have spent a lot of resources in developing a robust pipeline of leaders proficient in handling our complex retail operations as we expand.By Joachim Nisgaard, Group Senior Director, Head of Talent Management & Learning, Salling Group LEADERSHIP DEVELOPMENT IS EVOLVING WITH MODERN TIMES
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