Leadership in the Face of Rapid Growth

A major retail chain’s growth strategy called for increasing retail outlets by 250% in a ten-year period.  Company leadership knew that kind of growth would require executive attention to leadership development in order to maintain high quality management while facing high turnover rates and intensified demand for new store managers and associates.  The RBL Group was brought in to help create a leadership development strategy that would facilitate the growth strategy and maintain critical standards and culture.

The RBL Group helped the senior leadership team:
      • Quantify full impact of growth in terms of number of new store managers
        and associates needed given current turnover rates
      • Identify critical hiring and leadership development investments (in
        addition to already identified asset and capital investments) that
        would be required for the strategy to be successful
      • Re-focus training and development investments on store managers (not
        middle managers or executives) for strategic success

• The company began placing more emphasis on leadership intervention for critical jobs. 
• Company executives were convinced of the importance of dealing with growth in business impact terms instead of value terms; ignoring the significance of leadership on growth would be detrimental to success.
• Executives initiated the process of identifying a leadership brand that would embody the values of the past with a perspective for the future.