"Walking every aisle is a new practice for store bosses in her area, implemented by their regional manager. It helps managers “see what your customers see,” says Hart, and pay attention to details. It also keeps her employees on their toes."
I can't believe this wasn't policy already. Seems like good practice.
You would think so. I was working on an oil rig and they made a big deal about ‘management by walking about.’ So the heads of each of the departments were supposed to go and check ONE job their charges were working on that day. They were supposed to write a short report about what they observed. This was too much for them so they quickly got in trouble from shore-based management for not filling out their reports. So they promptly delegated to the next-in-line management They promptly delegated it to the people doing the work so once a week besides all the other paper work I had to fill out a report about how I was observing myself working safety while management still had no clue what was happening.
> How do you know what's going on if you're not there?
> Ask a restaurant manager. Or a bartender. Or the manager of a retail shop. Or a call center or an office. Or the supervisor of a factory or warehouse floor. What do you think they'd say? [...]
> Ask anyone responsible for something, "How do you know what's going on if you're not there?" and you'll always get the same answer: "You won't."
> Unless they were an I.T. manager.
Not really though - that's an entire article about how IT is so unique and special in how disfunctional it is, nobody else is like IT, aren't we the special snowflakes. That's almost the opposite of what the previous poster was saying!
That’s sort of different stakes, right? In your case your direct managers decided to prioritize not doing their jobs over some pretty important stuff—your personal safety and the damage the oil rig could do to the environment if something went wrong. In the case of walking the floor in a store it is just aesthetics mostly.
Thank you to clarify. Then why did you write "just"? In one reading, this is slightly dismissive. In retail spaces, cleanliness and tidiness is very important for the shopping experience.
I disagree that it matters beyond sanitation, although I admit that’s a matter of preference. In any case, it isn’t life-or-death, environmental catastrophe level stuff.
You apparently didn't live in the U.S. during the late stages of K-Mart's existence. K-Mart was a major discount retailer, locked in a years-long battle with Walmart. But in the years before it finally went under, many stores (maybe all?) were plagued by messily stocked shelves, unattractive merchandising, stock pulled onto the floor and not picked up, dingy flooring and poor lighting. I'm not talking just the toy section, but the linens and other dry goods. The stores in my area were simply unpleasant to shop in, so people stayed away, and the whole company went out of business. There are certainly issues with Walmart as a company and employer, but in my experience their stores are well-maintained, the merchandising is decent, and the shelves are neat.
I both A) don't believe you at all (would you rather shop somewhere you can easily find and access the product you're looking for, or where you have to track down an employee to dig through the clutter to find each item?) and B) feel we should note that Walmart's "ideal shopping experience" is not the same as the customer's. They want you (in the amalgamated, averaged sense) to traverse the store in a certain way, to select the right items, to be enticed to buy the other right items, and to leave without encountering so much friction that you decide to go to Target next time; those subtler effects are absolutely affected by organization and aesthetics.
I don’t believe that you don’t believe me, and I don’t think either of us will be able to present a compelling argument about the beliefs and preferences bouncing around in each others heads.
This would be like asking the average corporate "software development manager" to actually look at the code/product developed by his reports. Except for early stage startups where the person is truly in a player/coach role, it rarely happens.
Toyota calls it a "gemba walk" -- managers and even executives need to walk the factory floor and see problems with their own eyes, not through hearing reports.
With software, the codebase is the gemba, not the office. Managers don't need to be writing code, but they should be reading it. Otherwise it's like a production manager who has never seen the inside of their own factory.
User experience and observing how they interact with the end product of software development is the true version of walking the aisles. What to find improvements, just be the person that trains and teaches the administrator, the general user, the maintainers, and the installers.
For example, I documented how to load an OS image for assembly. Watched them use the guide and saw they flipped through the document. Afterwards, I inserted an extra page of what shows up in the text stream and said, "sit and wait for ...." at that point they started flipping around.
That's looking at the car and driver, not the factory. That's important too! But the gemba walk is about seeing the factory floor where the car is made. If your cars are shipping late and there's lots of defects, you have to look at the factory to find out why.
For example is talking about the assembly line. Assembly workers are your users too. Having an application packaged as as an installer versus a ZIP reduces knowledge and work on both by the assembly user and the maintenance user. In automation, Assembly works still have to engage with the software and make configuration changes, from factory settings to job settings. There really is not a black and white, just a gray area when it comes to assembly and end user.
Not quite the same thing but I subscribed to one of my team's code review email lists. I also cc'ed myself on bug reports. Mildly interesting but didn't really impact anything although I was always looking for signals in the noise.
On the other hand, my boss had a de facto policy of visiting each remote office at least once a year and conducting one-on-one meetings face-to-face as much as possible. I found this useful for myself to understand the team/environment/product and good for building connections with people, especially when cultures are significantly different.
It did result in my visiting Wuhan 16 times between 2012 and 2019, for better or worse.
I mean, Wuhan isn’t some exotic danger zone. It just happened unluckily to become an epicenters for an outbreak recently, but otherwise it’s just a big city.
I work at an industrial plant (steel mill) - "Walking the floor" is still taught to current managers I think it comes out of LEAN manufacturing or similar. It is supposed to be an informal thing, so not looking over people shoulders and writing things up etc.
I believe the idea is for the manager to be visible and approachable so people can feel comfortable coming up to the manager raising issues etc. If the manager is away off site in an executive office or similar then it becomes an added barrier for people to be able to approach them, to notify them about issues etc.
Would you compare "walking the floor" to doing some PRs or improving test coverage? Neither of these specifically delivery features, but they keep a close eye on the software.
I would say getting a development environment up and running and running the test suite would usually be a great start. You’ll see pain points almost immediately if you just do those things.
I think one can definitely progress to becoming CEO of a large company by 37 if they make a lot of right moves, which I'm guessing she did. But yeah, to go from being the kind of manager that walks the aisles to the kind that regressed a bunch of great products - it seems like something broke along the way.
I have a 2011 mac mini I'm using as home server. It had Linux Mint for a time (this year) and it was snappy, except for browsing the web. Everything else work fine, even LibreOffice and playing videos. But load youtube and you can see the stuttering.
I have absolutely had managers (and managers managers) contribute code. I think the typical team lead manager lite position was supposed to be like 20% of time on development and my managers manager who oversaw like 30 people contributed some when our team was behind. Probably didn’t read much code outside of what they contributed though.
Since every company seems to come up with their own job titles, it would be more useful if you described how large your organisation was compared to the entirety of the engineering organisation at your company.
His style of leadership was what a good captain should be. Kind, caring, patient with everyone but also personally set and expected a higher standard. Mistakes were opportunities to learn, and you never felt belittled.
He was the kind of person that was the first to show up and the last to leave and knew every part of the business as if he had done it, and was busy but always had time for people and knew there names.
He was a leader not a manager or supervisor, a trait I’ve found common among military people.
He took cleanliness and safety seriously from the navy and applied that to the store, the store staff vacuumed and cleaned the store as it was his and we took pride in it from top to bottom and he lead workplace safety efforts very early on.
He ran the store like a family, and he shined his boots every morning.
Thinking back to one manager I had that everyone loved for similar reasons, and I remember now that he had a military background. I never thought then that it might be connected.
You’d probably enjoy the book Turn the Ship Around about a Navy submarine captain who transformed a low-performing crew into a strong, cohesive, autonomous crew.
I don’t really understand what this looks like. I mean, when I worked in retail, I was at a place smaller than Walmart, so, maybe Walmart managers tend to be more hands off and need to make a show of actually knowing what’s going on in the store.
But I’d typically get some instructions and then be left to clean up or stock things. Tidying up isn’t that complicated or high stakes. Normal people know what messy and clean look like.
My favorite managers were aware of what the store looked like and could say “tidy up the pillows” or whatever if something needed particular attention. But the manager that came by with attention to detail and an intention to keep me on my toes? Nah, that’s annoying. And even in a pretty small store, there are a lot of aisles to tidy up. If a manager is known to be annoying they’ll also have to waste time looking for me.
A Walmart Supercenter can have 500 employees and dozens of deliveries per day. I can totally see why they'd get wrapped up working mostly in the office and talking to department heads vs. walking the store.
> My favorite managers were aware of what the store looked like and could say “tidy up the pillows” or whatever if something needed particular attention. But the manager that came by with attention to detail and an intention to keep me on my toes? Nah, that’s annoying.
I'm confused. What is the difference? It sounds like "eye of the beholder" kind of stuff, like micro-management vs high touch.
MS popularised that, but based on some recent comments here by employees, it sounds more like they're just getting force-fed the dogfood without having any power to change it.
I can't believe this wasn't policy already. Seems like good practice.