My guest today is my wonderful friend, the unstoppable Sally Coates. Sally has always had a passion for retail and has led large merchandise teams for top-performing ASX listed companies including Woolworths, Wesfarmers and David Jones.
Sally has also held CEO roles in various SMEs and through her leadership, she has turned them around and increased growth by focusing on developing, implementing, and embedding the transformation strategies needed to ensure they have the foundations and plans in place to be focused on a long and sustainable future.
In 2020, Sally founded ‘The Retail Mentors’, a network that brings together the leading minds of the retail industry and is dedicated to creating, shaping, and influencing the future leaders of retail, and the retail businesses of the future.
Sally is making it count by founding the Retail Mentors to help people working in retail and make mentoring more available to people outside of their network.
In our conversation, we’re talking about claiming your power back. Sally explores how The Retail Mentors help so many people in the retail industry find mentors, connect and build a supportive network. The mentor supporting them is present in a genuine capacity so the mentee feels safe to be vulnerable and honest to make true headway in their career.
Sally openly shares about a challenging and difficult situation in a previous workplace with a boss. She was working 80+ hour weeks and was feeling absolutely exhausted. The emotional abuse she experienced working in the role, from her boss, felt very similar to a previous relationship which flew up red flags. She decided she had to do what was right for her, claimed her power back and walked away from such a toxic situation.
She learned to remember and know her self-worth, no matter what other people say and do. Remember to put forward the achievements of yourself and your team. Sally tells us that quietly doing an amazing job isn’t always the best way to get noticed and advocate for yourself and team.
Sally has conquered two enormous mountains, Kilimanjaro and the base camp of Mount Everest! She shares her journey to making the decision to pursue these amazing challenges and how she prepared for these epic climbs. These goals gave her something to strive for that weren’t based on her professional career and she thoroughly enjoyed the whole process. She discusses her self-development and what she learned about herself during the hikes.
You’ll find so much value in this conversation, Sally is definitely making it count every day through her generosity and passion for shaping our future leaders. Sally tells us to remember that we’re all so different and what you expect of yourself isn’t necessarily what you should expect of others.
LINKS:
Connect with Sally Coates:
LinkedIn: https://au.linkedin.com/in/sallycoates
Website: https://www.theretailmentors.com/
Connect with Julie:
Instagram: @juliehydeleads
Website: https://juliehyde.com.au/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/julie-hyde/