When The Program Isn't The Problem

(Bergdorf Goodman)

Corporate handed down a selling program. It was designed to work across a portfolio of 40+ stores, which meant it was designed for none of them in particular. My job was to make it work at Bergdorf, which is a different proposition entirely.

Bergdorf's sales associates weren't entry-level retail employees who needed to be taught the basics. They were tenured professionals serving ultra-high-net-worth clients in one of the most recognizable luxury institutions in the world. A program built for broad application, delivered as written, wasn't going to move them — and it hadn't.

I rebuilt it as a four-day immersive with two distinct tracks: one for sellers, one for managers. Because those are different jobs requiring different development, and conflating them is one of the most common ways corporate programs miss their mark. The content was calibrated to the actual service environment: the weight of the brand, the sophistication of the clientele, the specific dynamics of a floor where a single client relationship might represent hundreds of thousands of dollars in annual revenue.

The seller track deliberately paired plateaued performers with peer experts — top personal shoppers who'd built their books over years — creating knowledge transfer that no outside facilitator could replicate. One seller who came in having flatlined their sales not only grew their business but ultimately became a personal shopper themselves. That's not a training outcome. That's a career trajectory.

The manager track worked differently but proved the same point. One manager came in managing an employee who had perfected the art of weaponized incompetence — consistently claiming inability to process basic transactions despite repeated training, redirecting clients to other floors, and defaulting to the manager to step in and solve it. The manager kept stepping in because the customer was standing there. The program gave them a framework to stop. The employee, no longer able to rely on that pattern, figured it out. The behavior stopped.

That's what a well-designed program actually does. It doesn't just teach — it changes the dynamic.

What moved: 

A stalled program became a functioning talent asset. Sellers who had plateaued grew their books. Managers developed the tools to handle performance issues they'd been absorbing instead of addressing. The redesigned format became the reference point for how the program should be delivered across the broader organization.