351 The 5 Things That Make You a Better Salon Manager and Leader

[upbeat music] Are you a good manager? Now, that's often a hard question to answer because sometimes it's easier to blame or justify your management failings on the people that you're trying to manage. In other words, what might actually be your shortcoming somehow becomes someone else's fault. Now, I know when I opened my own salons, that was something that I was guilty of. I'm Anthony Whitaker, and this is the Grow My Salon Business Podcast. I once read that the difference between management and leadership, and the mistake that a lot of people make, is that they try to manage people, whereas the better approach is to manage things and lead people. Because when we make the mistake of managing people instead of leading people, those people start to feel like things, and when that happens, your team is left feeling unappreciated and disposable. As a salon owner or manager, you have a lot to do, and part of your job description is that you're responsible for the success of your team, and essentially that means that you have two separate objectives. The first is to improve the salon's overall productivity, which is a measurable outcome, whether it's total service revenue, retail sales, pre-booking percentages, or ultimately the salon's profit margin. The second objective is to lead your team and the individuals within it towards what their own personal success looks like for them, and that's a lot harder because people aren't measurable in the same way productivity is. People are complicated. They all come with a backstory, their own values, ambitions, insecurities, and plans of their own. So you can't manage people in the same way that you manage things or processes because the variables that make up an individual are different every time, and so you need a different approach. And that's what I mean when I say that when it comes to the people on your team, we need to talk about leadership, not just management. So here are five things that will make you a more effective manager and leader. The first one is that you design the system. Think of your business as being one big system, a lot of moving parts that are all connected in one way or another, and every part or every individual within the business has a specific purpose that contributes to something bigger than just themselves. That's what a successful business actually looks like. And when it works well, collectively those parts create a culture, a way of working that enables everyone on your team to become the best version of themselves. I always think it's important to remember that the people on your team want to succeed. They want to do a good job. And as a team leader, it's your responsibility to involve them in creating a system that sets them up to succeed so that they can achieve their own goals and ambitions within the culture that you've created. And if the people on your team are not achieving their potential, then as the leader, it's also your responsibility to identify the problem or change the system in order to help them succeed. You're either helping them to do a better job or you're getting in their way. So make sure that you and the systems are not standing in the way of