Aaron Owen is a proven retail, sales, and operations manager whose alumni praise him for his natural curiosity in learning nuances of the business and translating that knowledge and motivation to staff. Noted for his consistent wins, Aaron has a pattern of developing successful collaboration efforts among cross-functional teams and he’s won repeated awards for it! He’s Joining us today to share some stories from his people leadership journey and walk us through a couple key techniques he uses with his own staff.  In the episode, you’ll hear Aaron share some humble failures from his first management role that you just might relate to (I did).  You’ll also hear him describe some techniques to balance accountability with genuine interest and engagement in the well-being of your employees. 

I’ve invited Aaron to the ManagerMirror because his experience spans hands-on retail leadership all the way up through leading large corporate teams in the telecom industry.  Aaron started his career as a store manager at GameStop where he worked for six years before holding similar store-management roles with Rent-A-Center and Connect Wireless – his first step into the wireless telecom industry.  In November of 2017, Aaron stepped into an individual contributor role at Verizon and hasn’t looked back since.  He’s been promoted 3 times in 5 years at Verizon leading sales teams and growing into strategic leadership responsibilities. Aaron prides himself in consistently developing, adapting, and improving actionable initiatives that put clients first while facilitating team and company growth. Today he’s the Manager of Enterprise Sales Operations for Verizon and he’s recorded with me to share his story and hopefully a few techniques aspiring people managers can put into practice.  Follow Aaraon on LinkedIn for more posts on leadership and sales!