If Your Staff Sucks... (GAMA Presentation)

Welcome to a long-winded discussion on all things staffing, specifically how to curate an excellent team and how to lead effectively so they stay excellent—not to mention motivated—and continue to get the work done you hired them to do.

This post is an adjusted version of a seminar by the same name I presented at GAMA Expo 2026 just a few days ago. In it, I’ll be focusing on retailers and, more specifically, the tabletop game industry. Please feel free to continue reading even if you’re not in the industry, or in retail at all, but be warned some examples might not connect. That’s okay, nothing’s perfect.

Also, if you’re in the industry but aren’t a member of GAMA yet, I’d encourage you to join, and I recommend checking out my writeup from last year on why GAMA Expo is an incredible experience.

Before we get into this brutally honest and self-reflective discussion, I want to address a few things you won’t be seeing.

The basics. I’m assuming you’ve been in business, or have managed a team, for a while. You’ve made job listings and hired. You’ve conducted meetings, given feedback, and know the essential duties of HR within your organization. You process payroll and know the local and federal legislature, wage requirements, benefits, and follow the rules. You’ve written schedules and dealt with time off and sick leave, even when it comes up at the last second. Plus, you’ve probably had at least one employee not work out, meaning either they quit or you had to fire them.

Witchcraft that psychically takes over your team and controls their brains. Maybe there’s a book out there in an occult shop about creating a zombie army of workers. This ain’t it.

Manipulation tactics. We’re here to work for our team so our team works for us, not use dark psychology and underhanded tactics, including punishment and abuse, to coerce people into following our commands.

Instead, let’s talk about the team as an extension of ourselves, and about being an effective leader and setting correct expectations.

We’re going to reflect on our own behavior, then walk through how to better connect with people, understand people, and choose the right ones for our team.

I hear you saying, “but I don’t want to lead the team, I want to focus on the business.” But, frankly, leading the team is the business. You run an operation that requires a team to succeed, therefore, this is an accessible and mandatory part of your life now.

Running a specialty retail store isn’t like being in corporate. You can’t delegate this down the chain. When your entire payroll likely consists of, at most, 15 people, not knowing each person on an individual basis is irresponsible. I’m not letting you off the hook that easily.

For example, a retailer I know said, “I didn’t meet my newest hire until the staff meeting,” as though it was out of his hands. He had no role in the hiring or onboarding process of his own business. If that sounds like you, then it’s no wonder you feel like your staff are out of your hands, because you’ve made it that way.

Anyway, now that I’ve got my scolding out of the way, let’s begin.

Trust

A lot of us, myself included, want to trust that our businesses are running smoothly even when we’re looking away. In fact, it’s especially true when we’re looking away. We desperately want to trust the people we hire to take care of our stores, the place we’ve poured our heart and soul into, as though it were their own.

No wonder it feels like a betrayal when we see someone, or an entire team, disregard tasks we view as important, refuse to communicate, or be flaky. But I’m going to challenge you to go deeper than the knee-jerk reaction of anger and/or frustration.

Trust is a two-way street. Times aren’t like they used to be. People won’t listen to you just because you’re the boss, whether you like it or not. If you want to be able to trust your team, then they need to be able to trust you, too.

In case it needs to be said, don’t be a dick to your employees. Don’t be abrasive, or rude, or volatile. Be consistent in how you interact with them, even if you’re having a bad day. Nothing undermines trust like lashing out or acting condescending.

Mutual Accountability

The concept of accountability applies to you as much as it does to your team.

You want them to be accountable. To do what you hired them to do. To do what you asked them to do. Fair enough. That’s the basic fundamentals of employment. We don’t need to dig into it.

On the other hand, your employees will also hold you accountable. Not in the sense they’ll scold you when you mess up, but that you’re only as good as your word, and when they see accountability slipping at the top of the organization, they’re likely to slip, too. It’s a slippery slope and it runs downhill.

So, you have to be accountable for your own actions. When you tell someone you’ll do something, you need to do it. A team member gets promised a raise? Do it. You offer someone the weekend off in passing? You commit to that, even if the weekend gets busy and you really wish you had their help.

A job description is also a form of accountability. It’s a contract between you and your team about your mutual obligations—you have to follow your end, and they follow theirs. But if you start asking them to do work outside what you hired them to do, and especially outside the hours you ask them to work, don’t be surprised if they start to feel resentful. You’re changing the deal.

Now, a dream employee likes going above and beyond. They thrive in that environment, and are excited to take on new tasks. If you have someone like that, swaddle them in a warm blanket and keep them forever.

Or, short of that, make sure they know you appreciate them, and give them the tools to succeed. Which brings us to empowerment.

Empowering Your Team

To empower employees to take actions themselves, to find problems and to work proactively towards solutions, and to self-manage, you have to show them you trust them and that they can trust you not to react poorly.

An employee is going to be afraid of messing up, for example. Chances are they’ve been criticized, yelled at, disciplined, or fired for messing up at a previous job. If you want your team to take risks and do things themselves without getting explicit permission from you first, you have to also reassure them they won’t get in trouble when they inevitably make a wrong choice or try something that goes poorly.

That’s about trust. A lot of forming a cohesive team, ultimately, is about trust.

Encourage your team to try things themselves before coming to you for help. Be careful where you enable this—for example, something that’s business critical and has to be done a specific way is a poor candidate for a creative adventure. But when it comes to everyday operations like receiving orders, helping customers, and pulling cards, you’d be surprised how helpful it can be to encourage your employees to get creative with their approach.

For example, no two people on our team pull cards the same way. They all know how to check for lists, what pricing we use, and how to email a customer about their order. They know how to follow procedures to make sure those cards are brought in and out of the inventory correctly. But, everything in between is up to them. Some of them use a mobile device to carry the list around with them as they pull cards. Others team up in pairs with one of them looking up card location and price, and the other physically retrieving the card.

Do I have preferences? Of course. But letting the team decide how they get their tasks done keeps them more enthusiastic about doing it and, sometimes, leads to surprising innovations that improve efficiency.

Receiving Feedback Gracefully

As an owner, it can be difficult to receive critical feedback from your employees and customers, but trust me when I say there are few things more valuable.

If you’re empowering your team to explore creative solutions, then every now and then someone’s going to discover a really freaking good idea, and it’s going to be different than yours. It might even be the exact opposite of how you’ve always done things. Don’t get trapped in that thinking. I challenge you to evaluate the status quo every single time you think, “but this is how we’ve always done it.”

When an employee makes the effort to bring up an idea, take it seriously. Make time to discuss it with them. Ask them follow-up questions. Then, if it’s a good idea and you’ve put it through its paces, thank them for the idea and implement it.

That’s why “Card Singles” is a top-level navigation item on our website. That’s why our Discord server is linked all over our website. That’s why I write a weekly update every Monday. It’s why we organize our card singles intake by cabinet, so it’s easy for the team to break the task down into sections. All of those were requested by a member of the team that, upon hearing their suggestion, I implemented.

When you receive feedback well, and your team sees you take their ideas seriously, they feel more involved. This builds trust, and helps them feel bought into the business, because it shows you value them as more than a warm body behind the register.

Expectations

What do you want out of your team, and what do they think you want out of them? Are those the same thing, and did you communicate it clearly, or is there room for misunderstanding? And, more importantly, are your expectations reasonable?

People are people. I shouldn’t have to say that, but I do. Your employees aren’t a zombie army (unless you’re a necromancer, in which case carry on and I didn’t mean nothin’ by it). They have lives, and desires, and needs, and emotions. You, as the leader, have to understand those factors, because they affect performance and satisfaction.

So do this for me: write down your expectations for a run of the mill sales associate. Your basic hire. Whether part time or full time, it doesn’t matter. But seriously walk yourself through it.

Then, consider how much time they have in a day and what they need to accomplish. How much time is taken up by the chatty customer that wants a friend? How much gets spent pulling card lists, receiving orders, or stocking shelves? These tasks are time vampires that can often exhaust employees and consume large parts of their day.

Go back through your list. Try to assign an amount of time you expect each responsibility to take each day. Does the math work? If an employee works a 6-hour shift, are you expecting 7 or 8 hours of work from them? And, are you being realistic in your estimates? After putting down how long you think it should take, sit in your store and watch everyone work. Does it actually take that long, are they getting done earlier than you thought, or is it dragging on?

This is a helpful exercise not only to discover inefficiencies in your business, but to determine whether your expectations of a role line up with the reality of the role.

Especially consider: we’re often hiring entry-level positions at close to minimum wage. For a sales associate role, it could be that person’s first job. They may not be passionate about sales, or about retail. Few people are. Understand that you’re not hiring someone who’s spent their whole life anticipating this job. For most people, this is just a job—an exciting one, especially for fellow gamers, but still a job.

Temper your expectations accordingly, and watch the reality of the work getting done so your imagination doesn’t run away with your expectations.

Effective Communication

When it comes to expectations, it’s helpful to communicate. Your employees won’t know what’s in your head unless you tell them. For example, I write a weekly update and post it to our employee Discord server, tagging everyone on the team. It lets them know what to expect from the upcoming week, details any policy changes, and gives a brief description of our short-term strategies and why Tim, John, and I are making the decisions we make.

That helps the team know what to expect, what we’re doing, and why we’re doing it. Especially that last part: you’d be shocked at how far you’ll get just by explaining the “why” behind all the choices you’re making.

This is also part of empowerment. By communicating not just what you want accomplished, but why it’s important, you enable your employees to think it through in their own ways.

They understand, “we pull walk-in Magic singles lists because it creates a positive customer experience and because it’s a service our competitors won’t touch,” and that enables them to get creative in how they approach it. First, it makes them feel better about it, because they feel less like you’re barking orders. But second, it means they can find ways to deliver the good service you’re seeking without following your orders to the letter, which empowers them to achieve a goal in a flexible way that can adjust to changing conditions, even when you’re not there.

Realism in the Face of Growth

I would be remiss not to discuss expectation creep here, so here goes.

Sometimes a team is doing well, and the business grows, and as things expand, more work needs to get done, and new tasks are created. This is a good problem to have, but it’s still a problem. What often happens is that you, the owner, get busier and bogged down by an increasingly exhausting list of tasks, and that overflows to your team.

It’s easy to expect everyone to take on more, and new, work as the store grows, but that’s not a given. Not everyone on the team is going to be open to that—some of them might be happy exactly where they are, and that’s okay.

So, please temper your expectations. A lot of workplace conflict comes from mismatched expectations. If you do need to update the work your employees are responsible for doing, then you have to communicate it. Do it openly, and be receptive to feedback. Listen to their concerns and, where possible, pre-empt them with solutions.

If your business needs to scale, that’s okay. It’s better than okay, even—it’s great. But not every member of your team is going to scale with you, and that also has to be okay. Sometimes that means it’s time to say goodbye, and sometimes it means you leave that person alone in the role they’re good at and pass those responsibilities to someone else who’s more willing.

Operations

The most effective procedures come from a clear understanding of expectations on both sides of the equation. Luckily, we just talked about that, so we can put it to use.

Let me ask you this: have you trained your employees? Did you walk them through how to do each thing you expect them to do, or are you assuming they already know? Is it fair to assume they already know—a basic requirement of being hired in the first place—or is it an unspoken expectation you’ve made in your head?

Then, what does good training look like? How do you empower your team to handle matters themselves and be adaptable?

An Interlude on Teachable Skills

Some things are teachable skills and others aren’t. You have to know the difference.

You can teach someone how to sort Magic cards better. You can teach someone how to process online orders and mark them ready for pickup. You can teach someone to vacuum if they’ve never done it, or to dust, or how you expect them to dress when they come to work.

On the other hand, you can’t teach someone to have a different personality or be a different way then they are. I believe in authenticity in the workplace—everyone should be encouraged to be themselves. If who they are isn’t a good fit for the team or the work, get rid of them or, even better, don’t hire them in the first place.

You can’t teach someone to be conscientious. They either are or they aren’t. It’s a core personality trait. You can’t force a messy person to become tidy and organized. Someone who’s loud isn’t going to suddenly become quiet, and someone who’s chronically late isn’t likely to suddenly be on time just because you’ve threatened them. Neither is someone who naturally sleeps late going to have a good time if you schedule them for opening shifts. You’re asking people to go against their nature, and it’s going to sabotage both their life and their work.

Instead, you have to find what works for your team. That’s your job, not theirs. You’re the boss, the one in control, the one with final say, and it’s your business. Talk with them. Understand them. Then, figure out the schedule and tasks that work for who they are instead of trying to shape them into becoming someone else.

Bespoke Procedures

This is where I say something that’s going to sound difficult, and you’re going to go think for the rest of the day about what I said until it makes sense, because unfortunately I’m right.

When you’re writing procedures for your store, it matters a lot less how you’d do the task, personally, and matters a lot more how your team best completes the task based on who they are and the skills they possess.

In a corporate setting, you’d create specific procedures in a nasty blender full of HR regulations, legal compliance, operations manuals, and a particularly-stubborn executive team.

In small business, we have the privilege of knowing everyone who works for us, meaning we can tailor-fit our procedures to our unique environments.

If you only get one thing from my browbeating, please let it be this: just because you do a task a specific way doesn’t mean it’s the best way for your team to do it.

Everyone learns differently. When teaching your team new procedures or training them on workplace responsibilities, be mindful that the way you’re introducing it may not click at first, and be willing to adjust your approach to ensure your employees each understand the content.

It’s easy to get frustrated when an employee isn’t acclimating quickly to a task, but try to resist assumptions that there’s something wrong with them, and make the effort to try new approaches that may better fit their needs.

If they’re still not getting it, you can start to evaluate whether the employee is a good fit. But I strongly recommend exhausting all available methods first, especially when the employee seems eager to learn. Firing is a last resort.

Rewards

So your team trusts you, and you’ve set clear expectations, and your procedures support them. Chances are, that’s enough to grind turnover to a halt, make your team less likely to complain about you to their significant others when they go home, and build general goodwill. Yay! That’s some great progress you’ve got there.

But, sometimes we need a little more. A nice, delicious-looking slice of chocolate cake they see walking through the bakery of a grocery store and can’t resist but to pick up. No, I’m not projecting. I’m not drooling, either. Don’t be ridiculous.

Employee Benefits

Sometimes to keep your team around, and keep them happy, you need to provide benefits. That’s a lot deeper than just an increase in pay. I’m talking about making it obvious you care about their well-being. Because that’s rarer than you might think.

So here’s what you can do:

• Offer a retirement plan and give them employer matching up to a certain percent.
• Offer health benefits. Then, help pay for those benefits.
• Offer sick leave.
• Give them PTO and encourage them to use it.
• Approve their requests for time off so they can live their lives. They’ll appreciate you more, and they’ll come to work more motivated to try when they know you respect them.

Bonus points if you include them in choosing how they’d like those benefits to look when you can. Ask them what they want in team meetings, and what they need to feel better about life.

Performance Incentives

Beyond sticking around, though, you also want your team bought into your goals, yes?

That requires incentives. Offering an increase in pay is great, and important, but it’s not a great motivator for success. Instead, explore performance-based rewards.

We offer quarterly store-credit bonuses every quarter of a year that ends above the previous year’s sales. At the end of the year, we give out cash bonuses if we broke last year’s sales.

Where to Go From Here

When I present, I almost always improvise the ending. Honestly, I do my best public speaking without any sort of script, and I’m almost constantly improvising and deviating from the plan.

So, consider this an extension of that. It’s me reminding you, whoever you are, that you need to step up and be a good leader if you expect to have a good team. One cannot exist without the other. It’s a symbiotic relationship as old as time itself.

Here’s a little homework to help you in your journey: consider the potential of each of your employees. Not just what you hired them for, but the skills they have as a person, and how those could be best used in your store.

Maybe you have a sales associate who has an especially keen intuition for improving procedures, or an inventory manager who’s okay at their job but exudes incredible charisma. Write down 5-7 strengths of each of your employees, irrespective of their current role.

Then, consider how those strengths could best be put to work. For each strength, write down one task or position that would benefit from that strength, and at the end of your list, see if there’s any overlap between those strengths.

At worst, you’ll learn more about your team and their best qualities. At best, you might realize you’ve been underutilizing someone, or find a place where their skills are a better fit than their current role, and your organization will be better off for it.

Bonus Resources

A retailer friend I respect shared his experience writing industry-specific and highly-tailored job listings, and these are his suggestions:

First, if you’re posting somewhere like Indeed, pay to be a sponsored post. As he put it, “the cost of a bad employee that we catch quickly is still $2,000 so paying $500 to increase success chances feels worth it.”

Next, sprinkle in a hint of personality. If you’re a game store, ask about their favorite games, or about their passions. Do this in the interview, too. It’s a good way to get them to open up.

Finally, though there are many uses of AI that both he and I disagree with, we’re aligned that using it to draft a boilerplate job listing is an excellent use of ChatGPT, and he’s even shared the following prompt:

“Create a job posting for [store name], a Magic: the Gathering company looking to hire additional staff in their Card Grading department. Core responsibilities include conditioning cards, filing cards into inventory, and retrieving cards for customer orders.”

This example was for his card warehouse position, but adjust the topic to fit whichever role you need filled, and don’t be afraid to ask ChatGPT to give it multiple attempts with different styles.

References

There are a great many Gallup polls and reports indicating the importance of taking a strengths-based approach to team management, but here are a couple of the best ones.

How Can a Strengths-Based Approach Improve Organizational Success?

• “A strengths-based approach improves organizational success by aligning employees’ natural talents with strategic priorities, leading to higher engagement, increased profitability and significantly lower turnover. Organizations that incorporate strengths into the workplace see up to 23% higher engagement, 29% higher profit and 72% lower turnover.”
• “Employee strengths improve business performance by aligning daily work with people’s natural talents. This alignment increases productivity and profitability while reducing turnover.”

How Employees’ Strengths Make Your Company Stronger

• “Employees who use their strengths are more engaged, perform better, are less likely to leave — and boost your bottom line.”
• “By contrast, for the 37% who agreed that their supervisor focused on their strengths, active disengagement fell dramatically to 1%. What’s more, nearly two-thirds (61%) of these employees were engaged, twice the average of U.S. workers who are engaged nationwide (30%). This suggests that if every company in America trained its managers to focus on employees’ strengths, the U.S. could easily double the number of engaged employees in the workplace.”

You can view the original slide deck in Google Slides.