Your regional managers stopped coaching and nobody scheduled it

A Tuesday store run. Three stores on the list.

The first visit is meant to be a coaching session with a new 2IC who has been in the role a month. It turns into forty minutes walking the floor with a phone out, photographing what didn't get done from last week's VM directive. Store two runs long because the same thing has happened there. By store three, there is no coaching left in the day, and the 2IC has been rescheduled to next Tuesday, which is also going to be like this.

A multi-site leader at a sporting goods retailer described watching this happen over twenty years:

"It used to all be about retailing, coaching, being out on the floor with team and customers. But as we've got more data, got more systems, we're looking at more things, the role's become a lot more audit based… spending less time with the teams."

Nobody decided that. There was no memo announcing the change. It accreted, one system and one reporting line at a time, until the job was a different job.

The multi-site role used to be a retailing job. It quietly became a checking job.

The second voice is from a footwear retailer, and it is blunter:

"I'm going to just buddy up with an area manager for a day to just understand what they are actually doing on a day-to-day basis, because I've heard it's literally just cracking the whip with store managers."

Note what that sentence contains. A senior leader who does not know how his own field team spends its week, and who has to go and sit next to one for a day to find out. That is not negligence. It is a symptom of the thing this post is about, which is that the work is invisible.

Two businesses in unrelated categories, describing the same drift, unprompted, months apart.

Three unrelated retailers independently put it between 30% and 50% of the week

When asked directly how much of the field week goes on chasing rather than developing people:

• A sporting goods retailer: "I reckon it's more than 50% to be honest."
• An apparel group with more than 300 locations: 30 to 40 percent of the week on operational follow-up rather than coaching.
• A premium fashion retailer: regional managers spending roughly half of their working day following up execution.

Three businesses that share no category, no scale and no systems, landing in the same band.

None of them had measured it before being asked. That is the more interesting fact. The number was available in all three businesses to anyone who went looking, and nobody had, because nothing prompts you to.

If your own field week looks like this, it is worth knowing that it is not evidence your business is badly run.

The checking work is invisible in every system you already own

Your rostering system shows hours. Your POS shows sales. Neither records what happened inside the hours.

An executive at a specialty retailer described exactly this gap. They had just deployed a new rostering system and had proper visibility of hours for the first time. He still could not see the layer underneath: "we have a visibility of hours, but not truly what happens in those hours… It is a black box from my point of view."

That is why the drift went unnoticed for so long. It was never hidden. There was simply no report it would have appeared on, so it accumulated in the one place nobody audits, which is how senior people actually spend their days.

Every hour of chasing is an hour the business paid for twice

The mechanism is small and repetitive, which is what makes it hard to see. From an operator at a furniture retailer, describing a single ad-hoc request:

"A regional not having to send a variety of emails, make 10 phone calls just for something as simple as that… they're the things that can soak up a lot of time without a lot of reward."

The same business noticed the duplication running the other way too. Their regionals were "probably getting half a dozen emails sometimes relating to the same thing" from different parts of the support office, none of whom knew the others had asked.

So the cost isn't one regional manager's afternoon. It's the same question being asked and answered repeatedly across the network, by people who each think they are asking it once.

The thing you actually lose is store manager development

This is the part that shows up in your numbers eighteen months later, attributed to something else.

An operator at a furniture retailer put the stakes plainly: "we know that if we don't have the right store manager, nothing else matters." The same business had no leadership or development pathway for store managers at all. The coaching that was supposed to happen informally, on visits, was the pathway. And the visits had turned into checking rounds.

A chief executive who had recently stepped down from a national chain explained why that matters more than it sounds:

"People don't work for the company, they work for their leaders and their direct reports. And they also don't work for a scorecard. They work for the feedback they get on that scorecard from the person that they work for."

Sales per labour hour moves on store manager capability. Like-for-like moves on store manager capability. The checking round produces neither, and it consumes the time that would have.

Checking should be finished before the car door opens

The fix is not asking field managers to check less. The work is real and someone has to do it.

The fix is that verified completion arrives ahead of the visit, so the visit can start at why rather than did you. A customer described how to position this better than we would have:

"It should be positioned as a tool to help RMs operate at their optimal, get rid of some grunt work and focus on the things they're really good at: coaching."

Three things change on the ground. The milk run gets planned by exception, so the drive is toward the stores that need it rather than around the region in order. The store visit checklist gets shorter, because most of it has already been answered. And the 2IC gets the hour that was always meant to be theirs.

One honest caveat. A veteran of a discount department store group disputed this premise for his own business, and he was right to. Retailers with a single strong central gatekeeper for store communication, where nothing reaches a store without going through one desk, genuinely have less of this problem. If that describes you, the drift is smaller. Most retailers do not have that, which is what the sprawl of inbound requests is really a symptom of.

The short version

The multi-site role drifted from retailing to checking. Nobody wrote the change down.

Three retailers who measured it put the checking at 30 to 50 percent of the field week. It stayed invisible because rostering shows hours and POS shows sales, and nothing shows what happened in between.

The cost doesn't land on your field managers. It lands on the store managers who never got developed, which is where your like-for-like actually comes from.

Fix the evidence layer and most of the coaching time returns without touching headcount.

Frequently asked questions

How much of a regional manager's week goes on chasing task completion? In three unrelated Australian retail businesses asked directly, the answer landed between 30% and 50% of the week. None of them had measured it before being asked.

Is this a headcount problem? No. Every operator who raised it wanted the same number of field managers doing different work. Treating it as a headcount question is how the conversation dies, and it is why field teams resist the diagnosis when it is framed that way.

Why doesn't this show up in any report? Rostering shows hours and POS shows sales. Neither records what happened inside the hours, so follow-up time has no line to appear on.

What should a regional manager be doing on a store visit instead? Coaching the store manager and 2IC, working the floor at trade, and diagnosing why a store's shopfront conversion sits below the rest of its region. None of which fits in a visit that opens with a checking round.

Every quote in this piece comes from a recorded conversation with a retail operator. Names, brands and identifying details have been removed.