The Retail Practice builds on the thinking of McKinsey's Organization & Leadership practice to help retail clients thrive in a dynamic environment. Our work centers on such "people issues" as winning the war for talent, building sustainable organizational capabilities, managing performance, and designing effective organizations.

The war for talent
While the war for senior executive talent is one of the most pressing organizational issues for many retailers, most are ill-prepared for the battle. We help our clients succeed by putting a clear talent strategy on the top management agenda, developing a winning value proposition to attract and keep the best people, developing recruitment strategies that create a pipeline of strong talent, and pursuing aggressive retention tactics.

Skill building
Our approach to organizational work is grounded in the belief that the most clever strategy will prove unsuccessful if a retailer lacks the organizational capabilities to execute. We help retailers build high-performing organizations by assessing the structure, management processes, and talent approach required to build institutional capabilities, and executing capability building programs across relevant functional skills, such as marketing, merchandising, and operations.

Managing performance
McKinsey uses a wide range of diagnostic and intervention methods to help retailers achieve new levels of performance, from designing strategic incentives to creating processes to enhance group energy and alignment. For instance, our performance ethic framework offers significant insight into how retailers can use a variety of levers (e.g., management processes, incentives, values) to out-execute their competitors and generate outstanding returns.

Customized approach
We have significant experience in designing global and national retail organizations. Some organizational change programs assume a particular organizational model and attempt to fit processes, roles, and responsibilities around the "boxes." Instead, we advocate an approach that emphasizes fixing the processes first, and then articulating the roles required to support these processes.