The Average Wasn’t the Story

At WOW Mobile, we ran a program called Store Manager Excellence.

It was four sessions spread over several months, with our Area Managers doing the work in between. Their job wasn’t simply to reinforce what had been taught. They had to make sure the homework was actually being done and, more importantly, help store managers turn the ideas into behaviours.

By the third session, the results were visible. Stores were performing at levels they hadn’t before. But one area caught my attention. Not because its average was better.

Because of the shape of its results.

Alberta’s numbers were strong, but that wasn’t what stood out. The performance curve across the area was tight. The gap between the strongest store and the weakest had nearly disappeared.m Everywhere else, the program had lifted the average while leaving roughly the same gap between stores.

In Alberta, the gap itself had closed. That’s a much harder thing to accomplish—and a much more interesting result. An average can be lifted by a few strong performers.

A tighter curve tells you something different: whatever you introduced was actually transferring across the group.

What was different?

Erin.

Before joining us, Erin had been a competitive figure skater and then a figure-skating coach. She wasn’t necessarily a better manager than her peers. What she had was a skill they didn’t have: she understood how to turn instruction into practice.

Athletes learn this early. Knowing what to do and being able to do it are two different things. You watch someone demonstrate a routine. You try it. You get it wrong. You get corrected. You try it again. And again. Eventually, what you were shown becomes something you can actually do.

Erin ran her area that way. The program gave her store managers knowledge. She turned that knowledge into capability, one repetition at a time. And she did it without standing over them. Because the other thing a good coach learns is that you can’t make someone practise. You have to create the conditions where they want to.

Why this matters

I’ve spent a lot of my career looking at performance differences across teams, stores and managers. And I keep coming back to the same thing: The average can hide the opportunity.

When you roll something out across forty managers, or four hundred, the average will usually move. The more interesting question is what happens to the spread.

How big is the gap between your top-quartile managers and everyone else?

Because that gap is often worth more than the year-over-year improvement you’re trying to squeeze out of the average.

Alberta taught me something important. The gap wasn’t a talent gap. Everyone had the same program, the same materials, the same targets and, broadly, the same kind of people. What Alberta had was a manager who knew how to turn instruction into capability. That matters because capability can be taught. And if it can be taught, it can be replicated. Which means the gap in your numbers isn’t necessarily a fact about your people. It may be a fact about something your organization hasn’t yet figured out how to define, teach and reinforce consistently.

That’s why I start with the shape of the distribution. I want to find your Alberta.

Somewhere in almost every organization, someone is already doing something differently, and getting a different result. The work is to understand what they’re doing, why it works, and then make it easier for everyone else to do it too.