Archived How much do you have do be trained for in order to be promoted to team lead?

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Is there a certain number of work centers your expected to know being a team lead besides being a good role model and leading you're team?
 
The more workcenters you know , the higher chance you got of getting Teamlead. If on the bench and you only know lets say salesfloor. The chance of getting a GSTL,BRTL,FATL, is small while the chance of getting SFTL is less small. Of course being a Teamlead means knowing the basics of near all workcenters.
And if you become a teamlead please make sure you know how to pull an item out of back. I was called in to close as a cashier one day and walked into backroom to get rid of hangers, and watched a GSTL give waters to a guest without pulling them from location.
 
I think it depends greatly on each store and the leadership. I was hired as a team member but got promoted to a Team Lead position after 2 months. I had lots of past retail management experience but I just expressed interest and it happened. When I look to the people that are on the bench or interviewing now at my store, most are near experts in their workcenter but outside of it they don't have much knowledge. What I see going forward with the company is a breakdown of some of the barriers we've had between workcenters. I'm on the Sales Floor but the Front Lanes impacts my team greatly if they aren't working right. Ultimately, we have to work together to get the job done.
 
I was in the backroom for the entire 5 years I was there. I did nothing else. I was a backroom TM for the first year and a half, and then got backroom TL and did that for the next 3 and a half years. It varies from person to person I suppose. The way I act and think was more suited to the backroom (logical, strategic, tasky). I was not interested in any other position, and I was ill suited for them anyway, since I f***ing hate customers. YEAH I CALLED THEM CUSTOMERS. A guest is someone I invite in.

Anyway, I think if it's for your own workcenter and you are damned good at it, you'll probably be fine if the salaries like you. I've seen plenty of people though who were in one workcenter, and got a TL promotion to another workcenter that they knew little about (in terms of daily-experience details). It came down to having the right personality and a can-do attitude.

Of course though, it doesn't hurt to know more workcenters. Maybe a couple of other workcenters in depth, or at least enough knowledge about most workcenters to understand how they all fit together and depend on each other.
 
I wouldn't even think in those terms. While TLs are the owners of their areas and usually the go-to person for most things, when looking at getting promoted to TL there is no requirement of cross training. Will cross training get you to stand out as a team member through interacting with different store teams and leaders? Of course. But a TM cross trained in 10 different workcenters a good TL does not make.

Firstly, you should express interest to your current TLs and ETLs. Most are really good about once they know you want to develop further, they will help you out and give you opportunities to do so (I have had plenty of situations where I make a WTF face when I find out someone is interested in promoting simply because their actions would never suggest it). You should look at taking on tasks with more responsibility and show how you do a good job in your current workcenter first. Your STL will not promote you if they think you cannot lead a team, no matter how quickly you can push that CAF, how many REDcards you get, or how awesome you are with PTM. Is that the way it should be? Maybe, maybe not. But you can learn the basics of your area through training and any TL worth their salt will continue learning in order to become an expert in their area.

Being a TL, in my opinion, is all about being an effective leader and balancing parts of an ETL with parts of a TM. You need to be able to drive results for your ETL, be accountable for your results, and be profitable business wise while being able to still relate to your team and assist with their tasks (hell, sometimes you ARE the team if you're in an ULV or have no hours). When I was promoted to GSTL from GSA, I was given feedback about how great I was as a TM, but what the leadership team saw that I really improved on was being able to relate to the front end team while being able to command their respect when we needed to get to business.

Hope my ramblings will be of some help! :)
 
Store politics, at least in my store, played a much bigger role than it should have. There's a GSTL who started as an overnight flow team member about four years ago, then went to sales floor. He was promoted to GSTL without having been trained in that work center at all. And the guy's practically insufferable as a GSTL. Pretty much everyone on the front end has a hard time tolerating him.

On the other end of the spectrum, there was a guy who was a master of everything on the front end and wanted to apply for a GSA position that had recently opened up. A GSTL and the ETL-GE were all for having him fill the position. But since the STL is an insane jerk, the guy didn't get it. That guy subsequently packed up and went somewhere else and the store lost one of it's best team members. Actually, the store is steadily bleeding team members, mostly from the front end. And a lot of them are really good team members. It's sad to see what Target has become.
 
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