The NACS Leadership for Success (LFS) program is specifically designed to further the careers of busy convenience store managers, giving them tangible tools to create a more positive, engaged environment within their company and their stores. “It’s really empowering,” according to Joanne M. Loce, lead facilitator for the program. “Attendees take time to evaluate and target what’s important.” Loce is managing partner of Fortify Leadership Group and president of Loce Consulting LLC.

The nearly year-round program—made possible through a gracious endowment by The Hershey Company—kicks off each spring with a six-day onsite learning program designed to help emerging leaders build long-term skills. Attendees leave at week’s end not just with learnings that will catalyze their career and workplaces, but also with a fully developed project designed to achieve business results by applying what they have learned. The learning culminates at the NACS Show when participants present the results of their projects to a packed crowd of Show attendees in a special education session. A celebratory graduation dinner wraps up the journey.

Face-to-Face Collaboration

Each annual group of 20 participants starts the six-day onsite portion of the program with self-evaluation, using the DISC personal assessment tool, which centers on four different personality traits (dominance, influence, steadiness and conscientiousness) and how they can predict behavior toward others and the everyday things they do. The self-assessment “gives you insight into your natural work behaviors. What is your natural style, how do you communicate?” Loce said. There’s emphasis on good communication throughout the program, she added, because it is so fundamental to leadership.

As a result of the assessment process, attendees “start to see how they can be more effective. They learn about themselves, about their own individual styles, about how they like to lead,” she said. Participants “learn who they are and start to expand it out from there.”

Attendees talk about how transformational the program is in their lives, professionally and personally.

The group then learns how to set goals, to ask good questions, to listen, to give feedback and to coach employees. Participants delve into a deeper understanding of emotional intelligence, the ability to identify and manage one’s own emotions, as well as the emotions of others, Loce said, to help them to better lead their employees.

And each day during the program, participants are given time for contemplation, Loce added, including reflection walks in which they are paired off to stroll and discuss specific questions. The wellness and stress management component of the program includes three-minute breathing exercises and time-management techniques to help people better balance their work and personal responsibilities.

“We do spend time every day talking about the overall importance of balance,” she said. “For some people, it’s the first time they’ve paused … People are always on the move.”

As the week progresses, participants are grouped into teams of three or four people from different companies. Together they work on activities that help them learn to engage their teams back home and deliver results. By the final day, each group has put together a project to work on, along with a plan for how to stay connected with each other when they return to their own workplaces.

Inspired Teamwork

This year, Tanya Beach’s team decided to zero in on employee engagement and dubbed their group “E Squared.” “We used that square as our logo,” said Beach, who at the time was a Kum & Go general manager. The four members of her team worked together to refine their project.

“I knew I wanted to decrease turnover, and I knew I needed to get the team involved” at home, Beach said. Early on she had decided to conduct “stay interviews”—interviews in which current employees would be asked why they continue to work for the organization.

Her team discussions reinforced the decision to take this approach, she said. “A lot of what I heard from other attendees aligned with what I already thought, but it was good to hear it voiced out loud.”

John Kroger, a territory manager at Wallis Companies, was part of “The Engagers Team” at the spring 2018 session. Wallis Companies is a regional franchise developer for On the Run in Missouri and also operates the retail brands of Dirt Cheap and U-Gas. “We worked on individual issues and on group issues. We decided what project we would take back to our company,” Kroger said. His personal goal was to increase collaboration among stores in his territory. “I wanted to take 10 managers and get them to work together as a team, and I needed to find the right trigger.”

Applied Learning

After the onsite portion of each Leadership for Success session ends, participants return home to put their lessons and projects into action, with members of each group staying in touch across the time zones.

For Kroger, initially his take-home project didn’t go so well. He brought managers from his territory together to explain the goal of increasing collaboration among stores. The managers decided to collect products to donate to the USO, the nonprofit organization that provides services to members of the Armed Forces and their families. To get competitive juices flowing, Kroger told managers they would be competing with managers from the companies in his Leadership for Success team.

But suddenly, “we went from 10 tenured managers to five. Managers left the company or went to new territories. One of my locations lost half the staff,” he said. “We didn’t even get the contest started.” With Kroger’s focus on hiring new managers and getting them up to speed, the contest fell by the wayside. Employees collected 6,000 items for USO short but fell short of the goal of 10,000 items.

When she headed off to the Leadership for Success program in April, turnover was at 134%. By early October, after her return, turnover had dropped to 67%.

Still, Kroger’s Leadership for Success experience helped him transform a crisis into an opportunity. His LFS team members provided him with support throughout that long summer, even as they worked on their own engagement projects. Another program participant was going through a similar experience, Kroger said and “we cried on each other’s shoulders. There were lots of ideas and suggestions. More than anything, it was me talking to my peers and them allowing me to talk through what I was going through.”

An important lesson learned, he said, was that “true collaboration cannot be forced. The made-up contest didn’t work.” Moreover, Kroger and his store team discovered how engagement can grow out of adversity. “We formed mentoring partners,” he said. “New managers learn. Tenured managers also learn. They’re sharing best practices. They’re truly working together as a team. Now, through mentorship, each manager has a commitment to another one of our stores.”

And Kroger said that working so closely with the managers honed his leadership skills. “I came to the self-realization that I can’t do it all,” he said. “I don’t feel like I’m putting out fires all the time—[my colleagues are] there. I can bounce ideas off them. It has benefited their development and benefitted store sales.”

When Tanya Beach returned to her store, she set to work conducting the stay interviews she had discussed with her LFS team in Virginia. She lined up meetings and sat down with the nearly 20 employees to look at common themes and get to know people better.

“There were some people I didn’t know as well as I thought I did,” Beach said. “It’s fun getting to know your team, helping them get what they need rather than assuming you know everything.”

Conducting stay interviews “is not once-and-done. It’s so much more than that. You need truly open dialogue,” Beach said. And it’s important to follow up on the concerns that employees express in these interviews because “if you don’t do anything, then you’re breaking trust. They tell you things. If you waste their time, they won’t trust you.”

For the Kum & Go store, the result has been a dramatic reduction in turnover. When Beach headed off to the Leadership for Success program, turnover was at 134%. By early October when she left for the NACS Show in Las Vegas, turnover had dropped to about 67%.

At the NACS Show, Kroger and other members of the class presented an education session about their experiences, then took part in a fun and heartfelt graduation ceremony.

Loce encourages participants to stay in touch. Kroger said he already has reached out to a couple of fellow LFS attendees and hopes to stay in contact. “It was a pretty intense summer, coming back to almost mayhem. I’m still trying to catch my breath.”

Significant ROI

A 25-year veteran of the convenience store industry, Kroger said he highly recommends the Leadership for Success program. “At Wallis, we believe in education and training, so a lot of what we talked about in Virginia I had seen before. But to take everything and bring it all together, it made a whole lot more sense.”

Loce has led three Leadership for Success programs. “The exciting thing about this program is that people talk about how transformational it is in their lives, professionally and personally.”

Beach is one of those Leadership for Success participants whose life has been changed. She is no longer a general manager with Kum & Go—she was promoted to district supervisor and now oversees 14 stores.

“I had no idea that this would happen,” Beach said. “The NACS program really helped me be the best version of myself, to learn what I was doing well and not doing well. It was a reason why I was able to get my new position.” By learning to focus on leadership and engagement, “everything went in the right direction. I became one of the top performers in my district. It gave me credibility to apply for a bigger role.”

Unlock Your Potential

NACS Leadership for Success is designed for district managers, supervisors and other convenience store retailers, to raise their game and improve their leadership and operational performance.

Participants, who have been chosen by their companies, work on skills they can immediately use on the job, including:
• Increasing their understanding of how their actions affect their personal effectiveness
• Discovering how they work with others as well as how they are perceived by colleagues
• Defining a vision of their ideal leader-self
• Mastering tools to improve their leadership effectiveness and building better relationships
• Charting a course of action to apply what they have learned and become the leader they want to be

The NACS Leadership for Success program is graciously endowed by The Hershey Co.

For information on the program or to register, visit www.convenience.org/leadershipforsuccess.