Page 186 - Harnessing the Management Secrets of Disney in Your Company

Practice, Practice, Practice 167

lucky enough to witness Shlomo in action with a mesmerized group of
students of Suits U at the Fremont, California, corporate offices. These
students were “wowed” by a stage play depicting the fine art of selling acted
out by the man who once broke all company sales records in his Men’s
Wearhouse years in the field. On this very first day of training, Shlomo
makes disciples out of all who enter his sanctum. “Shlomo has uncovered
specific principles of retail that seem so obvious that you wonder why every
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company wouldn’t do it, but few are,” remarked Eric Anderson.
How Shlomo Maor communicates those principles is the stuff of
corporate legends. One minute he is bellowing about the importance of
timing when greeting the customer: “Do you think you should stand by
the door, and after the customer has spent 45 minutes driving in his car,
just jump into his face and ask, ‘May I help you?’ No. That’s wrong.” To
Shlomo, retail is theater, and the greeting is the opening action. He alerts
his students to the fact that the best salespeople set the stage before they
utter a word to the customer. Then all at once, Shlomo becomes the rev-
erent pastor in keeping with the Servant Leadership model. He describes
the synergistic environment, that the whole is always greater than the sum
of any group of individuals. Participants hear over and over again that
at Men’s Wearhouse there is no such thing as a zero-sum game, where
someone wins and someone loses. In the end, he reminds them that the
ultimate goal is for the company and the employee and the customer to
win. History has proven that countless more empires have been destroyed
from within than from the outside. After witnessing the interaction of Suits
U students with Shlomo, and with one another, it is almost impossible to
believe that this empire could topple!
Clearly, the best predictor of a successful Men’s Wearhouse store is not
a great salesperson, but rather a successful team. Moreover, the company
goes all out to motivate and reward team performance by staging frequent
contests and linking bonus targets to team goals. There are volume bonuses
on sales, plus weekly and monthly bonuses based on store performance.
Eric Anderson is convinced that achieving the goal of working collegially
in teams at Men’s Wearhouse is paramount to the success of the entire
team of nearly 8,000 employees. And to add certainty to this, he states with
conviction, “Ours is a culture where training will never finish last.”