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Leader?
by Matt
McGarrigle
Loss Prevention Lead
Sears Ontario, Canada
Leader, mentor and coach are all great terms and there
are all kinds of articles to read about these roles in
loss prevention. What about teacher or trainer? You can
be all three of the above mentioned through your status
in the company but does that mean you're a good teacher
or trainer? Retail organizations all expect the loss
prevention department to show value, what are we doing
to address that? Operations are now a strong focus of
the loss prevention department in today's age. Why
wasn't it before? How many times do you remember being
asked? How many apps you have? Or catch anyone today? Is
that LP operations?
Training and development within the loss prevention
department needs to expand with the right leaders,
mentors and coaches who are able to train and teach
their teams. Do we have set programs to develop our
teams to be operationally strong? In your LP division do
you have set champions that can assist you in the
training? On monthly conference calls do you have a
guest speaker from store operational departments to talk
about specific areas of the business that affect shrink?
UPC, Invoicing, front end, receiving, claims and
inventory departments all are great opportunities for
reducing shrink that have nothing to do with
apprehensions. Using your people within your district
and recognizing them as champions gives them a great
opportunity to take pride and help teach your teams
expanding their knowledge on business operations. Some
say it's up to the LP associate to learn, do we not have
an equal responsibility to teach someone trying to
learn?
Organizations are now turning to store managers to
become loss prevention managers, is it simply because
the loss prevention departments haven't changed? If your
LP teams were educated in depth about operations through
training and development would this be the case?
Wouldn't your LP team be better qualified to easily make
the transition into an LP manager role? LP managers with
no LP experience is this the quick fix?
We've all done the exercise of one story being told to a
person outside the room, that person tells the next
person and so on. If you're the LP speaker telling all
your regional or district LP managers the new programs
or direction at the company conference, what parts of
the direction didn't reach the stores? And what changed?
Maybe we need to look at a complete training tool that
reaches all. Train 100% of the entire LP team instead of
20% of your team receiving 80% of the training. Simply
put. We in Loss Prevention can't change who we are, but
we can certainly change who we can become!!!
Just a Thought
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