How Succession Planning and Employee Development Put Weekends Only on Track for Growth

Family-owned furniture and mattress retailer Weekends Only got its name from its disruptive business model -- it’s open only Friday through Sunday, when most people buy furniture, says John Wennemann, director of human resources. It’s become among the most-shopped furniture retailers in the St. Louis area, with fives stores, and also focuses on a low-overhead model so it can offer low prices and achieve its mission: “To Save Our Customers Money.”Weekends Only has established some aggressive growth goals, including opening a store in Indianapolis, which would be its first outside St. Louis. The company has found a business model that works and now has people in place who are ready to help it expand and move into new markets, with the greater goal of becoming a Top 50 home furnishings retailer, Wennemann says. “We’ve crossed that threshold.”Contrast that with where Weekends Only was five or six years ago: moving along at a decent pace but not necessarily growing rapidly because its leadership was having a hard time finding enough growth-oriented talent to be able to open new stores, Wennemann says.Out of its 350 employees, about half work part-time in the stores and about half work full-time, with a large share of those full-time employees in management. “It’s a fairly challenging model in terms of developing talent,” Wennemann says. “What we saw were people working in the business with potential, but we didn’t have the right tools to assess their potential and help them grow – maybe they could run a department today, but could they help grow the business?”To tackle that challenge, Weekend’s Only’s leadership team reached out to Success Labs for help figuring out which leadership competencies it needed to build up in its managers to best prepare and position the company for growth -- and to carry it into the future.

Software Adds Order and Objectivity

In the past, Weekends Only’s internal employee assessments were mostly subjective. One manager might think someone was ready to run a store, while another manager might not. To help bring order and objectivity to the process and help leaders more effectively identify which employees have the skills needed to move up and take on more responsibility, Success Labs got them using inQ succession planning and employee development software and evaluating employees on its 32 leadership competencies.With inQ and a manageable number of leadership competencies to work with, explained in a language that was easy for everyone involved the process to understand, Weekends Only leaders were able to automate the process of assessing employees, and easily see how their leadership competencies intersected with those needed to grow. “It was relevant to our environment, which made the acceptance level for the process much easier,” Wenneman says.inQ was easy to customize and was simple to use, too, Wennemann says. As a company striving to scale up, Weekends Only is often creating positions to support growth, and with inQ it’s easy to quickly create competency profiles unique to each  role while still using a common framework.“It’s become our working system for how we assess and create development plans for future leaders,” Wennemann says. “It’s not just a tool -- it’s a data warehouse that makes it easy for us to make consistent assessments across a fragmented organization in different locations.”The inQ software also provided a new, common language HR and management now uses to communicate about people issues, Wennemann says. “It’s not just a development plan tool -- it’s also a data warehouse that makes it easy for us to make consistent assessments across a dispersed organization and measure our bench in a variety of ways. And it's still evolving as we find new ways to use it and inQ adds tools based on the feedback we provide as users.”

A Better Method of Leadership Development

Success Labs also introduced Weekends Only to a new way of developing employees’ leadership competencies. Instead of taking employees away from their work to attend in-house or off-site training sessions, the company now uses developmental events and experiences to help employees learn and grow.“It’s a scalable tool that can really make a difference”, Wennemann says. “We don’t have a lot of extra staff or resources we can just put on the bench while they get training.” Instead, “the focus is on putting our people into situations and providing feedback to help them build their competencies while doing their jobs”Using inQ makes it possible to identify underlying leadership competencies early and create a path for employees’ development by identifying their strengths and those competencies in which they need to grow” Wennemann says. As a result, Weekends Only leaders are able to identify growth candidates with the potential to be future general managers from within the existing employee population. The data inQ provides is helping them strengthen their bench and feel more confident taking the company’s first steps into a new market. And with that, the company is proceeding with plans to open its first Indianapolis store in May 2015.Want to learn more about succession planning and employee development? Read our new guide:Success Labs is a leadership development and management consulting firm in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. For more than 25 years, our expert team of consultants has worked with hundreds of companies to explore their business potential and improve their company and cultural performance. Contact us to get proactive about your people strategy.