simplerich

Well, my past two posts talked about sort of last ditch advice to managers that were under me. This one’s not like that. This one’s more for me and the  job in general. I’ve had this job since 2000. That’s over ten years of District Management. Now, back to single store management. From a hundred employees to five. From multiple locations that are frequently 24 hour locations to a single non-24-hour location.

In District Management I was always having to rely on other people to a huge degree. As manager of a single location  I’ll be able to be more hands on, more able to know the things I’m interested in because I’m the one that my boss will be looking to to know things. I’ll still have direct reports, 4 of them now, but the distance between me and the information is so much shorter as a manager when compared to District Management. My ability to affect the changes I want will be much easier than before.

Part of the issue for me as a District Manager was communication. We had Sharepoint, faxes, conference calls, weekly meetings, phone calls, text messages, and all the face time I could squeeze in when you consider the 400 miles between some stores. But with all that there were times when communication wasn’t happening. I was too far away from the people I needed to be talking to, the front-liners. That was part of it. Another part was the filtering happening. Another part was I would say something and my managers would hear something else, then they would say what they thought I meant and the Sales Associates would hear what they thought the managers meant I meant. It was like a horrible game of telephone. I would say “Please make sure you smile at the customers when you’re talking to them,” by the time it would get to the Sales Associates it would be “And if you come to work crabby just stay home. Leave your problems at home.” Which isn’t at all what I was saying. Sure, that’s a great idea, but really, all I wanted was the employees to smile more. (That’s just an example. If any of my managers are reading this wondering when I said that it’s just an example, relax… although, smiling more is never a bad thing.)

So. My work was becoming more than what I did. It was becoming who I was. That’s true for a lot of managers. I think in some ways it is what makes a good manager into a great manager. The problem was… and this is a big one… I didn’t like who I was becoming, not as a person or as a manager. The joy was no longer there for me. When my phone would ring it was always something that made my skin get a size too small. Everything was an irritation. It got harder to find the things that made me love my job and I took vacations to try and find the joy again, to recharge my batteries, but it wasn’t coming back. I kept taking vacations that I didn’t want to come back from. Not just for a few more days, but ever. The problems were too big. I was too unable to fix them because I felt I was too far away from them and I felt that the job was too big for me. When I started as a DM I had 4 stores. When I stepped down I had 11. Somewhere in between those two numbers is the right number. I may have been able to do 11 more easily if I’d had stronger managers in some locations, but I couldn’t find them. I had too many places where I was getting by on what I had and didn’t have the time or resources (from above) to put into getting the warm bodies replaced. I had too many people who were adequate. They kept the stores opening (mostly) and they kept the shifts covered (mostly.) But if I felt I needed two weeks to get an extended stay hotel and really work on a store I was told that wasn’t in the budget and it wasn’t the way to do things.

So… too often problems remained unfixed and that was killing me. If I couldn’t fix the problems and was required to leave band aids on them… I couldn’t keep doing the job badly. So. I quit it. I stepped down. I tried to do it for a year longer than I wanted to. Maybe my heart wasn’t in it the last year and maybe I wasn’t trying as hard as I could. Maybe I was only going through the motions the last year. I really am not able to judge. I was too exhausted to try any harder though.  Years of that and I’d quit getting any satisfaction from my job at all. All that was left of the job was the comfort of a steady check in an economy that was anything but reliable.

What do I hope to gain out of stepping down? Honestly? A break and some satisfaction from my job again. Throwing myself into fixing one store, really fixing it. From the floors to the doors to the customer service will be something I know I’m good at, something I know I can do. I hope to get back in the habit of success and not just the habit of exhaustion. The old job had killed any feelings of success in me. I felt like a consistent failure and wasn’t enjoying things any more. That’s no way to live. It was to the point I had to change what I was doing or quit. Life was happening all around me. My friends were all having lives without me and I’d hear about it on Facebook while I sat in a hotel three states away. So, I went back to managing for some time back home, with my friends, doing a job I know I can do and doing it in a store I know I can change and turn around. I’m ready to have some fun again at work and I’m ready to have some successes.

If you’ve made it this far in the series thank you. I’m going to finish this series with a quoted twitter post from a friend of mine Chris Kasten from Denver, CO. I think he groks what I am talking about. His post summarizes where I’d been before I walked away from it all and stepped down.

My startling realization of the day: It is way too easy to confuse comfort for satisfaction.

– Chris Kasten on Twitter.

The Changes: It’s been a good run. Part 3 of 3 by Rich Griffith, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.