Her Story
About Melissa
I have been in upper management and senior leadership for over 20 years. I'm currently at Lowe's, where I've been in my position for almost a year. Before that, I spent 6 years in retail management with Lidl, and prior to that, I was an assistant store manager with Lowe's for 7 years. My main area of expertise is employee engagement and development. I'm responsible for doing the prep work behind all of the merchandising moves in the store. Every day, I start by reviewing my plan from the day before, touching base with all my employees about their different tasks, and outlining what the next day should look like. I conduct our morning meeting where we talk about our safety topic, our goals for the day and week, recognition amongst the team, and any additional training. There's a lot of flexibility in my role as far as having to move and pivot all the time. My most notable achievement was with Lidl when I was recognized for taking over a store that was not performing well and being able to close in all of the metrics we were measured on to get that store fully functioning for inventory, write-offs, and productivity in an 18-month period, when it wasn't thought that we would be able to turn it around completely. I'm a very hands-on learner, and I don't expect the team to do anything that I can't do myself. I get straight into working alongside my team to understand the ins and outs of everything so that I can best support the team that I manage.
Her Interview
Ten minutes with Melissa
01What advice would you give to young women entering your industry?
I think that we have progressed a lot in the workforce, but there's still a lot of work to be done. You have to have the confidence in yourself before your team is gonna have confidence in you. Figure out how to be the most versatile leader that you can, and don't put yourself in a box. Sometimes people do wanna put female leaders in certain types of boxes, but you really have to kind of break barriers still, even today, and continue the work in the workforce. Because it's so easy to sometimes allow yourself to kind of be categorized, because unfortunately that happens a lot with female leaders.
02What are the biggest challenges or opportunities in your field right now?
On a daily basis, we're given one plan as far as how long things should take, but in reality, they usually take longer than that because we're dealing with live customers and obstacles that can happen on any given moment with these merchandising changes that we have. A lot of that is trying to alleviate stress from the team so that they can work best, while also getting everything accomplished for the day, for the week. Checking on multiple people that are doing multiple resets so that we're following safety guidelines can definitely stretch me a little thin at times, but I do everything that I can to make sure that the team is taken care of first and foremost, while also getting my own work completed. It's a very fast-paced environment, and I would say no day is the same as the day before. It requires a lot of pivoting, a lot of restructuring plan A through E sometimes that we have to pull out of the bag to get things accomplished.
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