One person cannot be the sole catalyst for change. Great ideas can come from anywhere. You have to trust your team.
These thoughts on
leading change from Richard Gerver, formerly a star head teacher and now a
travelling speaker, form a cornerstone of Change, his exciting new book
published by Penguin.
Gerver is a maverick and
most independent retailers will warm to him immediately from the pacey
prologue. Change is a short book. It is beautifully presented and filled with
ideas that will encourage you to live your dreams and to connect to other
people.
“We have all got to stop
assuming we live in unique little silos that nobody else could possibly
understand,” says Gerver.
He recommends that you
take time out from your shop to explore the world and learn half-a-day at a
time from other people’s experiences. His book is not about self-help nor is it
a management book. What Change does do is give readers ideas on how their ideas
about developing their businesses (and lives) are worthwhile.
As a head master of a
small school, Gerver had to manage everything himself. People used to bring him
problems and feel they had done their job leaving him to solve them. What he
found was that his real role was to refuse to be responsible for everything.
The more risk he took in empowering the people who worked for him, the better
results they achieved together.
His book is packed full
of interesting stories followed by questions and suggestions about what readers
might want to do next. At one level, readers can substitute shop staff for
teachers and customers for schoolchildren. This works powerfully.
“Kids, like customers,
are not stupid. You ignore them at your peril,” says Gerver. “They don’t like
being passed off with something that you, yourself don’t particularly care about.”
Teachers used to do
things because they were told by people at the top that they were safe things
to do. The children saw through this and did not respond. What we had to do was
change the focus and say we’re not here for the government but for the children,
says Gerver. So we built the school for the children, to make it as exciting as
Disneyland, so they were queuing up every morning to come to school.
Similarly with your
customers: Gerver encourages you to trust your instincts and to do what you think
is right. While he respects rules, he also believes in adapting them if they
don’t work.
Change is “not a how-to
manual that says if you do this, this will happen. What I want is to actuate
open-ended questions and to sit back and watch the power that leads to dramatic
transformation”, he says.
Gerver’s book is about
an outlook on life that will suit the sensibilities of many independent
business people. He observes that “knowledge that is not passed through the
heart is dangerous.” If you like this idea, you will like his book. Reading it
will challenge and encourage you to be a lot braver about making your own
decisions, about delegating and about listening to your customers.
Read more at www.betterretailing.com
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