Great Management Makes All the Difference

My daughter started playing golf this year. We weren’t sure if she would make the team as a senior, so we waited to invest in all the gear until we knew for sure. Now we are scrambling to get everything she needs since she made the team!

We rushed into our local sporting goods store one day after school last week and only had about 45 minutes in our busy day to find golf shoes before we had to get to our next event. Our plan was to try them all on and get the most comfortable, not the most stylish. 
 
It was going to be a bit of a rush, but we‘re good at making quick decisions. They had a large display of shoes and we walked around, found several to try on and then we waited. And waited. And waited some more.

We did not have ONE employee come over and ask us if we needed help and offer to get the right sizes from the back. In 45 minutes. This store has a reputation for not having many people in the shoe department, and we’ve experienced lengthy waits in the normal shoe department, but nothing like this.

Luckily, they had mostly 7.5s on display and that happens to be her exact size. We tried them all on, left, and bought them online instead.
 
After we left, I pondered how something like that could happen.

The problem wasn’t really that an employee failed to help us. The problem was that no one appeared to notice that customers were standing there ready to buy and there was no one available to sell to them.

That’s a management problem. I felt very confident that their golf shoe sales had to be VERY poor. How could they not be when they made it literally impossible to walk out of the store with shoes in hand?

I went back a few times after that, out of curiosity, and sure enough, that section was a ghost town every time I visited.
 
Good management makes all the difference.  I’ve worked for good managers, great managers, and even a few sub-par ones. Great managers listen. They strategize.

They want their employees to shine. They look for gaps and they figure out how to fill them, whether in the shoe department at a local store or a multi-million dollar corporation.
 
Find a good manager to work for, and hold on tight. They really do matter.

What do you think? Share with me in the comments!

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