I built the same thing three times without noticing

I found the same sentence in my own résumé twice, written eighteen years apart.

I was going through old files and stopped on a line from 2004, describing what I had done as VP of Corporate Stores at TELUS: introduced a store management performance model built on target setting and coaching performance.

Then I found it again. 2018. Rogers Branded Retail. Almost word for word.

I had not planned that, and I had never noticed it. I thought of them as separate jobs — different companies, eighteen years apart, different problems arriving in different decades. What I had actually been doing, without ever naming it, was installing the same management system in three organizations and watching it work every time.

What was actually repeated

TELUS Corporate Stores, 2000–2004. We built a store management performance model around two things: targets people understood, and coaching against them that actually happened. The results were 107% of the 2001 sales target, 122% of the EBITDA target, subscriber churn down 57% year over year, and consistent 20%-plus sales growth.

WOW Mobile Boutique, 2015–2018. Ninety-three locations representing six wireless brands, run by an outsourced operator with none of the infrastructure a large company takes for granted — no central training function, no established management bench. We introduced non-negotiable operational and sales standards and rebuilt recruitment, store management and coaching practice. Sales up 60%. EBITDA up 300%. Store productivity up 60%. Turnover down 15%.

Rogers Branded Retail, 2018–2021. Three hundred and sixty-two corporately owned stores, more than 3,000 people. The same model again — target setting, behavioural standards, coaching performance — plus a reset of workforce management standards. Productivity up 15%, and sales productivity and customer satisfaction both up 20%.

Three companies. Three decades of my career. One intervention.

What I had misunderstood for years

In none of those organizations was the problem talent, and it was never effort. The people were good. They were working hard. Some of them were working harder than the ones getting better results.

What varied was what individual managers did on an ordinary Tuesday afternoon. How they set an expectation. Whether they let a standard slide when the day got busy. Whether they coached, and what coaching meant to them. Nobody had ever defined any of it, so every manager invented their own version — and the gap between the strongest managers and the median ones was where the results actually lived.

That gap is not a talent problem. It is a definition problem, and definition problems have solutions.

You cannot hire your way out of it, because the next manager arrives into the same vacuum. You cannot motivate your way out of it, because the problem was never effort. And you cannot train your way out of it, because a workshop does not change what one of your forty managers does on a Tuesday.

The part nobody expects

At TELUS, while all of that was happening, employee engagement went up 20% — best in company and best in class, every year, five consecutive years, with attrition lower than anything we had seen.

That is the result I get asked about most, usually by an HR leader who has been holding the question quietly: will pushing this hard on performance cost us our people?

It did the opposite, three times. Not because we were gentle about standards, but because ambiguity is what exhausts people. Being asked to hit a number nobody has explained, by a manager who coaches differently every week, is far harder on a person than a clear standard held consistently by someone they trust.

Why three matters

One strong result can be timing, or context, or a talented individual in the right job at the right moment. Two can still be read as coincidence.

Three — from the same components, in three different companies, across eighteen years, in organizations with almost nothing in common structurally — is a pattern. And a pattern is the only thing that credibly transfers to an organization I have never seen.

That is the whole argument, and it is why I stopped describing this as three good jobs. Consistency is not a personality trait that some managers have and others do not. It is a system, and systems can be installed.

That is the work I do now.