The path from retail floor to agency boardroom is not as unusual as one might think, and the lessons learned along the way tend to travel well.
Liam Bircham, a director at Heaps + Stacks, the experiential marketing agency, recently reflected on a formative experience from his early career in store management — one that had nothing to do with advertising but everything to do with the collaborative dynamics that make agencies function.
At 19, Mr. Bircham was a trainee manager at Schuh, the British footwear retailer, running the menswear department in Liverpool while a peer ran womenswear. The two were, by his account, locked in an escalating competition that had drifted from motivating to counterproductive.
"Every success became a comparison," Mr. Bircham said. "Who would get promoted first, who received the most praise, whose department performed best."
The intervention came from their store manager, a man named Steve, who sat both trainees down for a conversation that Mr. Bircham describes as pivotal. Rather than disciplining them, Steve reframed the goal: the point was not for menswear or womenswear to win, but for the store to become the best in the district. Individual victories, he explained, meant little if the larger enterprise was suffering.
(This is, of course, a lesson that certain holding company executives might still benefit from hearing.)
What struck Mr. Bircham most was something Steve said toward the end of the meeting: that if the trainees wanted to compete with anyone, it should be with him — and that he looked forward to the day they surpassed him entirely.
"Steve wasn't threatened by the idea of us becoming better than him," Mr. Bircham recalled. "To him, our success would mean he had done his job well as a leader."
Mr. Bircham, who has spent the past nine years working in experiential marketing and commercial strategy for lifestyle brands, now applies that framework at Heaps + Stacks, where he focuses on client partnerships and agency growth.
The stockroom, it turns out, is not a bad place to learn how to run a meeting.
Original story published in lbbonline.com: "Early Lessons in Leadership with Liam Bircham"