Corinne Hancock regularly faces life and death decisions as an international aid worker on the African continent. She says the day-to-day chaos that convenience store owners and workers face isn’t all that different from some of the daily challenges that she’s confronted overseas: Relief trucks stuck in impenetrable mud, relief workers sick with undiagnosed diseases, relief buildings damaged by violent storms. Almost sounds as unpredictable as another day at the c-store.
As a general session speaker during the digital 2020 NACS Show, Hancock will explain how c-store owners and teams can turn the sudden and unpredictable impact of chaos into an effective way to help a business to thrive. The title of her NACS speech: “Thriving in Chaos.”
“It’s all about what you do and how you lead when chaos hits,” explained Hancock, who has worked on more than 50 international projects with leading organizations including the U.S. Department of State, USAID and Project C.U.R.E., where she was the director of clinics and training programs. She is also the founder of The Curiosity Project, a nonprofit organization that provides health and entrepreneurial opportunities in countries where people have limited access to resources. Just last year, she was in the Central African Republic accessing health facilities to help advise the minister of health on what supplies and equipment were needed to prepare for the imminent Ebola crisis.
While working in the chaotic trenches of Africa, she has cradled babies as they died in her arms. She has witnessed mothers dying in childbirth, and she has observed mothers giving birth by Caesarean section with no pain medication. “How you react to chaos—and it will come—shows who you are as a leader, particularly if you can use it to your advantage,” she said.
Get Mad or Get Smart
For retailers—particularly c-store owners, workers and vendors—the chaotic aftershocks of the financial and human devastation from COVID-19’s unrelenting grip on the world continue to reverberate industrywide. When chaos comes, the nation’s 152,700 c-store owners essentially have two choices: Get mad or get smart, said Hancock.
Focus on the moment, embrace the chaos, then take action.
Getting smart wins every time.
Let’s take one of the c-store industry’s most common daily chaos-producers: The employee who calls in sick. Since the onset of the pandemic early this year, this has become an increasingly common problem for all retailers. How should c-store managers or owners respond to the employee who can’t make it to work?
“You will never solve anything by freaking out,” Hancock said. The gut instinct, of course, is to blame, complain or try to avoid it all together, when an employee is suddenly absent. That, however, does nothing to improve the situation. At the same time, it demonstrates to employees that you don’t really value them as human beings. “Instead, we must focus on the moment, embrace the chaos, then take action,” said Hancock. “You can never be chaos-proof, but you can always be chaos-ready.”
Here are some steps she suggests taking:
- Get curious: Contact the store manager and ask them to sympathetically reach out directly to the employee and find out what got in the way of them coming to work.
- Get creative: By creating a human connection, you can offer to help them. Maybe their car broke down, and they need a ride—or perhaps they had a snafu in child-care plans. A savvy manager can offer an assist with these things.
- Get smart: By repeatedly turning to this option when your c-store experiences chaotic events— instead of panicking—you create a company culture of kindness that, ultimately, can work as an incentive to retain employees and encourage them to make an extra effort to regularly come to work.
“If people feel like you understand the challenges they face—even just in conversation—your connection and culture will improve,”said Hancock.
Want another example? It’s the hottest day of the summer and two chaotic things just happened at once: Your c-store’s air conditioning broke down, and the beer delivery truck never showed up. In other words, customers who walk into your store are all going to complain about the heat—and they won’t be able to purchase what would normally be one of your top-sellers on a hot day.
How to react? Well, not by blaming the store manager, then placing angry calls to the AC repairman and the beer supplier, Hancock said.
How you react impacts how the rest of your team reacts. Thriving amid chaos means becoming curious enough to ask the good questions that help you understand why the chaos happened—then creatively collaborating with employees to come up with a positive response.
For the broken AC, until you get it fixed, what if you collaborated with employees on a creative way to make lemonade out of lemons? Say, for example, you put a big sign out front of your store that specifically says while the AC is temporarily on the fritz, you’re offering free (small) fountain drinks to customers to cool off in the heat, suggested Hancock.
As for the missing beer, well, until that arrives, you could place a sign by the beer cooler that notes, in the absence of beer, there’s a special deal on wine today, she suggested. “It’s all about getting a manager to empower employees to understand the impact, then solving the problem by having the courage to take positive actions,” Hancock said.
Keep Calm Amid Chaos
Sometimes, the best path from chaos is simply about keeping the people around you calm. Back in 2014, when Hancock was in the Democratic Republic of Congo leading a medical training team, the team was suddenly advised they had to prepare for Ebola. They didn’t know the potential impact at the time, and they had very limited information—which kept changing. On top of all that, Hancock had her then-9-year-old son, Chase, along with her on the trip.
Her mission as she saw it: Keep everyone calm. “The more clear you can be with the people around you, the more you can help them feel safe and secure,” she said. Also, listening—really listening—to the fears of others “can be one of the best things you can do,” she said.
Her group accessed the supplies it had in-hand and quickly developed a training program where local doctors and nurses could help deliver babies as safely as possible with the equipment they had—even with Ebola fears rising. “Yes, we had to boil water and reuse sheets, but we did the best we could with what we had.”
Thriving amid chaos means becoming curious enough to ask the good questions that help you understand why the chaos happened.
The key to working hand-in-hand with people in the most remote African village is similar to working with CEOs at Fortune 500 companies: Every human being wants to feel as if someone is listening to them and that their advice is considered valuable. That, in itself, can help to turn chaos into progress, Hancock said. In turn, when a c-store manager or owner shows employees that they matter—and have a real impact on decision making—it generally keeps them happier at work and helps to diminish future chaos.
Sometimes the simplest outreach can make a difference. Hancock suggests c-store managers might find out from all employees if they prefer to be contacted via text, email or phone call. Not only does asking this question demonstrate that you care—but when you do reach out, you’ll always know that it’s in the manner that each employee specifically requested. “You stay relevant by asking employees the questions that need to be asked,” she said.
The best way for a c-store owner to turn chaos on its head, she says, is to embrace the resources you have. Sometimes it’s your employees. Sometimes it’s outside vendors. Sometimes, she noted, it might be a collaboration with NACS and all of its member resources. “Looking to NACS is a great way to find out what’s working—or not—for others,” she said. “And it’s a great reminder that you’re not alone.”
When she was a teenager in Colorado Springs, Colorado, Hancock recalls the Friday night hangout with friends was by the payphone in the parking lot at the local c-store. That’s where they’d meet to decide what to do for the rest of the evening. Sure, the owner came out once in a while to remind the group to pick up their trash, but he always made them feel welcome.
Nearly three decades later, Hancock still finds herself hanging out at c-stores with some frequency. Now, however, it’s typically at c-stores near airports. When she’s not restricted by COVID-19, she generally travels all over the country giving speeches and seminars. On the way to the airport after a conference, she typically stops at a c-store to fill up her rental car and grab some healthy snacks for the flight back home—typically a piece of fruit and a granola bar.
It also gives her a unique chance, she said, to interact and connect with local residents. She loves the opportunity to learn about local events and have new experiences. It just takes a little courage to have a conversation, she said, and you always can learn something new. And courage is something Hancock doesn't lack.
For a c-store to succeed in an atmosphere of chaos—be it COVID-19 or a busted AC—it’s all about taking the time to step back, access the situation and figure out what actually you have control over and what you have to creatively work with to respond to each day’s unique chaos.
“Chaos is the catalyst for innovation and growth,” she said. “Chaos makes you stronger—but only if you do the work.”