As a retailer, your team is your front line and the face of your brand. Which is why you want to set them up for success by giving them the knowledge and tools they need to meet this challenge head on.
Having the right people in the right place at the right time doing the right thing should be your goal.
Sounds good, but how do you actually make that a reality?
Meet the Fascination Advantage System. Think of this as your remarkable retail team-building secret weapon.
What is the Fascination Advantage?
The Fascination Advantage System, is the first personality test built on branding and it provides unique insight into how you best add value to the world.
Learning how we (or our brand) fascinate, helps us unlock a personality superpower that we can use to be our best in everything we do.
Based on more than 10 years of experience, the system has 49 different personality archetypes that are identified based on a primary and a secondary advantage.
For any retail business, the Fascination Advantage offers a proven, systematic way to build your team, create better customer experience and more.
Here’s how:
Hiring for Alignment with the Brand
Each brand has its own distinct personality, and understanding the advantages of that brand can help with hiring, promoting and so much more.
For example, let’s say your brand relies on an air of mystery. This would mean you’re using the mystique advantage. You may reinforce that mystique by never revealing certain information or hosting surprise pop-up events.
That means you need a team that can play to the mystery of your brand and when hiring, you want to seek out people who can embody this. With that in mind, you can ask questions that help you identify if they have qualities that are aligned with your brand.
Encouraging Greatness in the Moment
Every single person on your team, from the district manager to the cashier, has the power to be great. But often, as individuals we don’t know what we’re actually good at, or we have a hard time owning that.
The Fascination Advantage can help you give your team the understanding and confidence they need to embrace their greatness. It helps them unlock their own superpower so they can bring that to their role.
For example, let’s say you have a visual merchandiser with a primary advantage of innovation, which is the language of new ideas. They are going to bring a certain level of creativity to their job and may make decisions based on their fresh creations and expertise. Instead of looking for ways to micromanage them and quash their decisions, as a team leader you can encourage them to be great at what they are doing by collaborating with them when a change may be needed.
Or maybe you’ve got a sales associate who is a superstar at building relationships with customers (hello, primary passion) and another that rocks at educating customers about everything they need to know (primary alert). While they are very different in their approaches, by encouraging them to lead with their advantage, you’ll have two high performers, rather than one who feels like they’re not good enough in comparison to the other.
Creating a Balanced Team
For a team, one of the most critical things is ensuring that you’ve got a mix of advantages on a team.
Too much of one advantage can be too much of a good thing.
If you’ve got a team that’s all innovation, it will be all ideas all the time and not a lot of work will get done. (In this case, you definitely want some people with alert to get the details handled.)
Or if you’re too heavy on power, everyone is going to want to lead and make the decisions. It’s a recipe for conflict.
The ultimate goal over time, should be to see where imbalances may exist and correct them as you hire.
Here’s an example of what’s called a “team heatmap” where you can see the distribution of advantages for a group of people:
You can see in this example that this team is heavier on innovation, passion and power, and they could use some prestige, trust, mystique and alert. Ideally, in this case I’d recommend that they steer away from power personalities as they already are heavy on the power side of things, and to look for people who are good listeners and are detail oriented. This team needs some doers who can take ideas and execute on the decisions.
Use the Power of Fascination for Your Retail Team
For your retail team, the Fascination Advantage can be a game changer. What I’ve shared above is just the start and I’d love to share more with you.
You can schedule a free consult by emailing me at [email protected] to chat about how to use fascination with your team.
Disclosure: As a Certified Fascination Advisor I do receive a commission for any products sold and this post does include affiliate links
