Through 34-years of career in retail industry, I find myself as a seasoned executive with well balanced ability between field work and planning ability as a result of diverse experiences such as managing grocery store on/off line, updating and managing ICT as CIO, developing company-level strategy, heading franchise operation of convenience store. And I see myself highly customer-oriented because I started my retail career on the very field level such as sales manager, merchandiser, floor manager of ladies wear division of an department store, as well as general manager of hypermarket.
While I successfully finished my career as an executive vice president of one of the biggest retail companies in Korea, I still want to pursue another proactive career leveraging my diverse experiences rather than just relaxing and enjoying the rest of my life.
Among those experiences the last three years that I spent as a head of grocery store business means a lot to me because it was a good opportunity to accomplish meaningful results for both company and personnel level by making use of all the insights that I learned before. I had revitalized
GS Supermarket division by re-orienting business paradigm from short term profit oriented defensive strategy to growth oriented active strategy by strengthening core competencies such as merchandizing competitiveness, employee empowerment etc. prioritizing customer needs compared to all the related interests. With the faithful contribution of empowered employees we made profits in more than ten years overcoming many huddles such as high minimum wage, hyper competition across the business formats.
One of the most challenging positions throughout my career was CIO because I had no background with Information and Computer Technology to which I was assigned as a career development program. However, by leveraging my learning ability and consensus leadership I could develop and upgrade company level IT system to future oriented next generation level. Especially, narrowing the understanding gap between IT and business division by using plane languages instead of technical expressions happened to be a dramatic opportunity to earn the mind of executives including CEO.
Another intuitive and challenging experience was the job of head of operation in convenience store business because managing 3,000 franchisee stores demanded totally different paradigm and operational system from other businesses operated directly by company such as department store and hypermarket. Every strategies and operational activities such as in-store promotion should be understood and accepted willingly by franchisees to produce intended results. It means every idea should be simple and still value-oriented. And another basic and inevitable management issue was empowering employees to have ownership about company and motivated enough to actively communicate with and persuade franchisees because every intention of HQ should be explained and coordinate by staffs called OFC(Operation Field Counselor) who is in charge of 12 to 15 stores each. And you also need very sophisticated management system to control thousands of stores not to mention detailed support system such as logistics and IT systems. Based on the friendly and fair organizational culture that I implanted this division has grown to have more than 13,000 stores and annual revenue of more than 9 billion us dollars.
Another eight years that I spent as the head of strategy division was very productive experience because it gave me a chance to view business in more objective and future oriented perspective. Planning company and division level strategy, developing new business, and facilitating operational problems throughout hypermarket, supermarket(grocery store), and convenience store division demanded me to see things in totally opposite direction from my prior views set up mainly through operation and merchandising.
Another position that I am proud of is that of store general manager of hypermarket(GS Mart). I enjoyed the position very much because for the first time in my life I felt like a big man burdened with heavy responsibility and big empowerment together. Especially the experience of being involved in opening a new store from the store planning to the opening and operating the store brought me a great deal of self-achievement. Making projected profits through active sales activities while controlling costs reasonably was most demanding job. Anyway, it was a valuable opportunity to develop bigger leadership and solid competencies to grow as a retailer.
My best performance I think comes from leadership performance, or Human Resource Management. There are three principles in my leadership.
The first one is being friendly in personal relationship while demanding discipline and hard work in job performance. This comes from my EQ oriented personality that tends to understand other people’s needs first by listening carefully and later make my position understood clearly. I always pursue perfect achievement in works by empowering employees through consensus building, and real consensus comes only when there are human level intimacy and credibility between you and your members. People need to be motivated by heart not by head to do their best.
The second one is the balanced management of control and empowerment.
Basically I think empowerment is the most important factor in leadership performance because it gives people opportunity to be creative, positive and still responsible to one’s work. Of course you need to control employee’s work under your guidelines to make sure he is headed in the right direction toward achieving ultimate purpose and targets such as profit and sales volume.
The last one is doing together with staff members, or being in the front line in job performance especially in case of new projects, hard projects and service activities to customers. By being in physical sites I usually pursue consensus with members about business situation to motivate them and to develop right business direction itself.
Another characteristics I am proud of myself is customer oriented service mind. Through 34 year’s experiences in retail business, I am very accustomed to view every activities in terms of service marketing.
Based on the concept that customer satisfaction comes from every minor activities of employees in the fronline, not from big issues or events, I put great emphasis on training employees’ service mind and monitoring customer satisfaction through diverse channels such as customer panel, customer mail etc. Regardless of the formats of business I may join, I am sure I will always put customer satisfaction first.
One more thing I’d like to mention about myself is that I put more emphasis on long term business by strengthening core competencies rather than on short term results. Of course, short term output is important in keeping business rolling especially in case of tight financial situation. However, many managers tend to sacrifice long term growth for the sake of short-term fruits just out of habit or for more personal interests. For the good future of both company and individual employee himself, the balance between long term growth and short- term achievement is inevitable.
In case I have to choose one, I usually take long term business rather than short term one unless it is kind of emergency situation for the survival of business.
Learning and self-developing has always been the fundamental of my growth.
Leadership, Emotional Intelligence, Motivation, Empowerment, Negotiation, Strategy, Marketing, and Digital Technology have been my interests and they will be.
I got familiar with English when I was in university by reading TIME magazine intensively and I enjoyed reading books written in English throughout my career to broaden and deepen my management insights.
Having attended F.I.T., state university of New York, I can communicate in English well enough to do business with English. My best record in terms of English test is 955 TOEIC(1996)
I have can survive with Japanese because being in retail business in Korea means frequent contacts with Japanese counterparts and periodical travel to Japan for benchmarking. My official record of Japanese fluency test is level one(highest level) of JLPT(2011)
I have been studying Chinese for five years by myself and I am sure I can be fluent with it with a few months intensive study if necessary.
Thank you very much for reading my somewhat long story.
34년의 직장생활, 17년의 임원생활을 돌이켜 보면서 후배들에게 남기고 싶은 생각들을 정리했습니다. 효과적인 자기개발, 현명한 자기관리, 사람을 키우는 리더십에 관한 현장경험을 고스란히 담았습니다. 독자들의 보다 성공적인 직장생활을 응원하고 나아가서 모든 조직의 발전을 기원합니다.
