BUT I DON’T HAVE TIME! By Kym Krey
One of the questions I hear so often from my Salon Owner clients is….. ‘How Can I Get My Staff To Perform? They’re nowhere near target!’ Whilst we initially tend to place the blame squarely on our staff for their lack of performance, in most cases, the answer requires us to look closely at ourselves. I won’t be the first person to have told you that consistently high staff performance requires a continual coaching routine. A dedicated schedule of small blocks of time devoted to sitting with each member of your team, both one-on-one and as a group, reconnecting with your vision, values and expectations and reviewing their progress toward them. It’s absolutely essential that your people know exactly what’s expected, how they’re going from your perspective and what they need to do to make those numbers move or get where they need to go. No guessing. No assumptions. No ‘it’s just common sense’. No ‘shouldn’t they just know?’ But that’s not what we’re talking about today. What we’ll focus on here is the response that usually comes after that conversation about what it takes to get great performance from their team, and that’s…..
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Hair Biz Year 16 Issue 3
“But I don’t have time to do that!” And now we get to the real issue. Your focus has been on being a great hairdresser: perfecting your skills, building your clientele, and getting busy. You’re the one making all the money, right? You’re booked to the eyeballs with a waiting list, and making tonnes of money but the staff you employed to take some of the pressure off aren’t anywhere near target, right? If you take time out of your schedule to coach and grow your staff, you’ll be turning away clients which means turning away income, and that’s something you just can’t afford to do. So, you tell yourself you don’t have time to do it. In order to be able to spend that time with your staff, you would need to have convenient pockets of time magically open up that would allow you to have these conversations without any inconvenience or disruption to your schedule.
Can you see the issue? That’s never going to happen. So you’re going to keep squeezing in those clients to make enough money but also keep going home frustrated that you’re doing three times the work of your staff …. and that situation isn’t going to magically change by itself. You’re stuck. You can’t sustain working the hours/pace you’re currently doing (hello… burnout) but won’t allocate the time to resolve the problem. It’s a chicken and egg scenario. The answer is in your mindset. We need to tweak how you’re looking at the problem. What stops you from doing what you need to do to start correcting the problem (i.e. developing your team and resolving issues there) is that you’re not willing to forego that short term $150 or so that you think you’d make doing a client in that time instead. You’re thinking that each time I sit with my team member instead of taking that haircut, it’s costing me $120. But is it?
