If you were to be coached I would bring the GSA core roles up and the ethics of having a GSA play the role of the GSTL. A GSA should only be covering breaks and does not have proper authority to take team members out of their workcenter.
I wish the only role of a GSA was covering breaks..
That depends on the store. I have full latitude to ask other TMs to help cover breaks and get carts as needed as long as I spread it out amongst everyone and honor their work and breaks and coverage. Of course the TM is welcome to say no, but then the LOD will just back me up 99% of the time (as soon as I give my reasoning for asking that person) and the TM will look like a jerk for not being a team player.
Retail Girl has this on point. We aren't leaders, but we're still scheduled to be the person overseeing the front lanes and coordinating front end activities. ie: We're asking somebody to get carts because it has to get done, and we'll probably ask the person who is able to it with the least disruption to guest traffic.
Granted, we can't coach, but we can... 1) get the LOD for immediate support if needed, 2) we can do "teach and train's" with team members and act as their team trainer, or 3) we can just document various things like the example above and give them to the GSTL--Who can then follow up with the team members and take actions as needed.
GSA's aren't team leads, but it IS a unique position, and it's usually in a GE-TM's best interest to go along with what they ask of you. Everything we're doing or asking for help with
should be related to making sure guests have a great experience and that is, after all, the priority
First thing first, the food ave/Starbucks are NOT Front end and they have separate team leads because they have safety standards and tasks that need to be addressed and many other team leads/ team members do not understand the importance and timeliness.
Obviously TArget uses GSA's interchangeably with GSTL's but at the end of the day a GSA has no more authority then a team member. Everything you just listed a normal TM with team training can do. If it's a case of pulling a TM out of a different work center an LOD should be the one delegating it to the TM. If anything were to happened, and tasks not done, a TM could get written up for helping another workcenter.
Obviously it is "unique" but so are the signing, brand merch, bike building, receiver, etc, etc, but you don't see them pulling other TM from other work centers. That's like the signing TM telling a pog TM to set E34 because I don't want to have to fix all the falling signs from the LOD walk.
I'm not saying that this is how stores are, I'm saying that this is how stores run on paper, and if your being coached from
Not listening to your PEER, and for some reason are written up/fired/whatever, you can fight it because it is not in the GSA core roles to tell the food operations TM to stop what they are doing and get carts. In fact I would call the help line if that was ever the case.
Also, a GSTL should be prepping everything, schedules, breaks, covers and workload for the week. In case of call outs a GSA should always run things by an LOD.
All I'm saying is ALWAYS cover your tracks and have paperwork on your side.
This really shows how differently stores can be run. It sounds like you're at a high volume store, or at least have a high sales volume cafe! At our ULV, Food Ave is under the GSTL, we don't have an FA-TL. All of our food service team members (except one old lady) are cross trained as cart attendants and food ave, and work 50/50 in each for the most part (I probably should have mentioned that earlier.)
Like I've agreed with in previous posts, the food avenue duties and food safety still come first of course... but for our store we have an average of 20-40 food ave sales all day long, most of which are icee's/Popcorn and an occasional hotdog or pretzel. Our cafe is so dead that our FA-TM separates and staples all the stacks of pogs and revisions every week, still does all of their required temping, cleaning, date checking, opening/closing, etc etc, hands out samples, and still has a good two hours of complete free time where they literally stand outside the cafe and do nothing except greet guests walking by. So in our case, it makes sense to have our food service team member (who is also keyed and trained as a cart attendant) to run out and get carts when they aren't doing any of their safety/cleaning tasks. On a busy day, I might have to get
one guest a hotdog or icee while the FATM is outside. I was covering for somebody today and spent a good portion of my food ave shift outside getting carts, so believe me it's not like I won't do it, but when we say "hey can you run out and grab some carts" to a food ave team member, it has
never been a problem. Because that's just how our store does it, because our store hire's as food service/cart attendant.
Our GSTL also leads consumables, so she only spends 3 shifts a week up front; leaving most shifts for GSA's, so of course we have to take on a little more. Because that's how our exec's want us to do it.
My post that was quoted sounded snarky patronizing and rude, and i apologize for that; we don't run around pretending to be team leaders, and we definitely will not say "STOP temping your food right now we need carts!" We walk up to them and say "hey we're starting to run low on carts, can you run out when you're in a good spot and bring in a row?" because they're usually standing there waiting for guests that probably will not ever come, because they're caught up on everything and you can only repeatedly clean and sanitize something so many times before it gets redundant.
Our ETL's and LOD's recognize GSA's as stand-in leads for the front end; if we call them and ask them to approve asking a FA-TM to get carts, asking a cashier zone accessories, or any other little thing like that, they will literally say "Yeah, whatever needs doing" and give us an annoyed "why the F*** did you just waste my time asking" look. My STL and ETL's all just expect that we do stuff like that, so we do. We have to be crafty about it, in order to gain points with the rest of the team and not rub off the wrong way, but ultimately they do want the gsa's at my store to do that. Which is why we do. It may not be best practice, but that's become standard expected routine for every front end team member, team leader, sales floor team member, and LOD at our store.
Personal Side note: Since I'm on the bench along with being a GSA, my ETL wants me to be more of a leader than some of our newer gsa's as well.. AKA she reams my *** if I'm not doing regular teach-and-trains with our front end team members, engaging and inspiring the team to drive conversion and profitable sales through great guest service, planning and organizing checklane and onespot POG's and resets, watching for low-speed cashiers and helping them find techniques to improve their speed scores, and a bunch of other stuff. She gave me all of these in written expectations that she had signed, so I have my tracks covered if anything ever becomes a problem. I covered for our GSTL for a few months while we didn't have one, and did everything except the coachings (which I still basically did second-hand by passing them along to a TL that I partnered with.) It was a developmental opportunity that they offered me and I took it. They weren't anticipating our GSTL to come back so they were basically bumping me into the position before it was officially open, but then she did come back and I stayed a GSA.
Hopefully this cleared up anything that may have been lingering regarding my posts in this thread and why I tend to overstep the boundaries of a GSA (I do it because my ETL, old STL, current STL, and DTL all tell me to.)
