Departmental Store Retail: Shopping Centre, Change and Creative leadership

Business Nature A retail group is running business covering department store retail, shopping centers and online retail. They are the domestic commercial retail leader with stores across regions in China and have rich operational management experience and strong brand management capability.

Challenges The group was encountering the threat from online shops and the changes of shopping behaviors of customers in the internet era. Therefore, they had determined to transform the business from a conventional offline retail model to an online-to-offline (O2O) retail model. However, all their retail leaders had been used to the traditional face-to-face retailing approach and felt uneasy and unwilling to change their ways of doing things and managing people. Moreover, the leaders have no ideas what to do in order to align the future development of the group.

Interventions ROCK tailor-made a modular change and creative leadership program to train up the frontline general managers to adopt the new O2O strategies. The series of programs guided them through the change process and helped them discover what they needed to do to meet the future changes. In addition, they were also required to create new projects in a bid to prepare for the transformation. ROCK designed a system for monitoring and was providing coaching services to facilitate them to get the projects done well in 3 to 6 months.

Achievements 200+ frontline general managers were trained up in 2 years. The general managers got much better understanding on the new strategies and came up a work list to prepare for the transformation. 32 change projects were created and presented to the management, in which, half of them were selected and implemented. The group was being regarded the pioneer which has been continuous innovation and transformation in the country’s retail business.