simplerich

I was training a new employee at work today. Today was her first day. She used to be a customer and would only come in when I was working because I made her feel welcome, comfortable and special. She said she wanted to work at a place that employed that kind of person. She and her mother came in almost weekly for about six weeks. They wound up sending me a thank you note and bringing me a plate of goodies after they were done doing their party they were doing. It was VERY nice.

At shift change today my clerk that’s been there six months and the new girl were talking and the six month employee said, “Rich is the best manager I’ve ever had. You know some places have like good cop assistant manager and bad cop manager? Well Rich is totally good cop and he’s the best manager I ever worked for. He really cares about his employees and it’s awesome.” The new girl said, “Whose the bad cop?” The six monther said, “You don’t need a bad cop when everybody looks out for each other. The assistant is more gruff or short or rough around the edges, but he’s not a bad cop. Rich likes to think he is but he’s totally not.” I was counting my drawer down while they “girl-talked.”

I interrupted from my counting, “Don’t believe her, I’m a jerk if you mess up.”

Six-monther said, “You won’t want to mess up. It’s like you let him down and he doesn’t yell at you at all, he just goes all quiet and talks about how he knows you can do better and how did he mess up in the training or the communication of what he wanted and by the end of it I’m all, ‘Just yell at me! I’m sorry!‘ He’s great. I don’t ever want to work for anybody else. I wish I could have trained you one day, but I’m not management though.”

I interrupted again, “If the schedule had worked out I’d have totally let you train her. You’ve got an excellent work ethic, you do your cleaning really well, the customers really like you. I’ve got total confidence in your ability to be an excellent example to anybody I hire.”  That’s true too. I wasn’t just saying that. She’d have done an excellent job.

“See! Isn’t he great? Now how awful will I feel if I mess something up tonight?” Six-monther laughed, “I won’t though. He makes it easy to do good.”

Now, I’m not saying this because it makes me look good or makes me look like a push-over. I’m not… but there are a LOT of ways to manage and expecting good things, encouraging good things, and rewarding good behavior works for me, a LOT better than just punishing bad behavior. Which I DO do when it needs it. But it’s nice when an employee is bragging about how great it is to work at a place. I’m super excited for my crew and for the new employee being excited to join a crew that’s excited to have her and doesn’t see her as a threat to their hours.

Over on my personal blog I mentioned I was not only back from Lincoln, but gave a few of the notes I’d taken of things to remind me to blog about when I got back. Some aren’t going to be long enough for a whole blog by themselves and some are… well… some may need two. They’re at the rolling around in my head stage of development right now.

It was nice to go back to doing my old job for a week. The setting up the new store was nice and the working with a new manager was nice. The store wasn’t open so a lot of the training opportunities I’d have had in that sort of situation didn’t present themselves as I’d like them to have. There were chances to teach though. At one point when the employee was upset about something that affected her personally… a mistake that’d been made (and rapidly fixed!) I managed to turn that into a teaching opportunity as well. Whether or not the new-manager turned it into a learning opportunity or not is another matter. That was one of the things we talked about believe it or not.

The days were long, and the work was hard. It was hot out and some of the work took me outside long enough to work up a good sweat… which is unfortunate. But the heat and work meant that no matter what I ate, within reason, I didn’t gain any weight… and believe me. When eating on the road and on expense account AND with a bunch of other people (who are NOT watching what they eat) it’s easy to go off-plan.

I think my first blog post will hit tomorrow and will be on a topic not mentioned over at the other site, but hinted at here in this post. Glad to be home. Looking forward to the next time I get to go help out on a special project. It was fun.

So, sometimes work makes me crazy right?

It’s management and I’ve been at it for a while. Sometimes I feel like I’m saying the same things over and over to the same people and I just want to scream! Or it seems like the higher-ups are making insane decisions without even talking to any of us front-liners. Or it seems like politics are what are driving decisions instead of the good of the stores, company, whatever. It’s been like that in almost all the places I’ve worked and under everybody I’ve worked for. Some things are just perceived that way sometimes. (For all you co-workers out there reading this wondering if I’m violating our don’t talk about work under pain of termination brand new shiny social media Internet policy I’m not. I’ve had bouts where I felt like this in every job I’ve ever been a member of management in, so get over yourselves. This song isn’t about you!)

So, to all you white-collar whiners out there talking about how this is terrible and you don’t know how much longer you can do it blah blah blah. Find one of your blue-collar friends who actually WORKS for a living and go work with them for a day or two. Seriously. On your next vacation or day off see if you can go to work with someone who works with their hands and back for a while. I’ve made a point of doing this through the years. I’ve walked beans, worked construction, and most recently, worked installing hardwood floors and carpet. (Oh, and if you don’t have any blue-collar friends, you should go find some. Broaden your horizons a bit. Diversity isn’t just about race or ethnicity or any of that. Diversity is about diversity.

It was two days before I could make a fist or pick up my coffee cup without thinking I was going to drop it. Tack strip, the stuff that goes along the edges of a room so the carpet can be attached to it and stretched into place, is a demonic thing. It’s a strip of wood about an inch wide and quarter-inch thick that has nails going out both sides. It’s alive, hates me, and is out to get me, not kidding here. Some nails hold the strip to the floor and others hold the carpet to the strip. It’s nailed into the ground, sometimes concrete… BY HAND… right next to sheet rock. Care to guess what happens if the hammer slips and slams into the sheet rock of this person’s brand spanking new house? Yeah… nothing good.  What happens if you’ve cut yourself on the tack strip or one of the dozen knives used to cut the carpet, pad, whatever? Yeah… you’re bleeding all over brand new carpet in this person’s brand new house. You want stress? Forget getting your TPS reports done on time and CC’d to the right people. Install carpet for a day in new construction.

What’s that? It’s “just” manual labor? Until you’ve done it I don’t think you’re entitled to say “just” in that context. It’s like waiting tables or working behind a counter at a fast food restaurant. Until you’ve done it I don’t think it’s a good thing for you to look down your nose at those people. “But I went to school so I wouldn’t have to do those kinds of jobs.” Ah. I see… and yet, you need them. You need those people you’re better than. You need them because regardless of how much education you have… they have skills you don’t have, skills I don’t have and I’m a pretty smart guy! I’m also smart enough to know that while I play at carpet installer there’s no way I’ll ever get higher than assistant flunky. Perhaps one day I’ll be a full-fledged flunky… one day years from now. But those people holding jobs other people went to school so they wouldn’t have to do… I’m glad they’re there because I can’t do what they do and I’m really glad they’re there to help me when I need it.

The person I worked for is picky. He’s a perfectionist. If I were getting flooring done I’d want him to do it because I know it’d be done right. Working for someone like that is sort of like working for me. I’m picky at my work. I want things done right as well. It’s HIS name on the side of the van and it’s his reputation on the line with every nail I drive and every cut I made. I asked for him to check my work probably more than he wanted to, but his confidence in my ability was higher than mine. Funny thing that… I’ve had employees say the same thing to me. He, without knowing it, was doing to me what I do to my employees. He showed me how, he let me do it while he watched, and he trusted me to do things that he knew he could fix if I botched… and he got out-of-the-way to let me get the experience and confidence I would need to do other things.

You know what I’m most confident about? My hands are almost fully recovered. My back isn’t hurting too bad today, and my knees… you have any idea how much time you spend on your knees when working on floors? A LOT! They should put floors higher!!!… my knees will one day recover I’m sure. Would I do it again? Yep. It’s kind of fun in a way. Part of the fun is I know I don’t have to do it a lot. I’m choosing to do it and it really looks good to leave work at the end of the day and see what you’ve done in a very real, tangible way.

PS: I didn’t do any of those accidents yet. The worst I’ve done was an accident involving a saw, a board kicking back, the back metal plate breaking off, and the palm of hand being smashed to pulp and bursting so blood oozed out onto the floor and continued to seep out most of the day. No bones were broken so I’m happy. I feel bad for wrecking the saw though. No clue what happened, just glad I still have all my fingers since it happened so fast it was over before I knew anything was happening. It made the most spectacular bruise on front and back of my hand. In the story I told there was me defending a bus load of nuns and orphans from terrorist hijacker ninjas. Please don’t tell anybody the truth. The ninja thing sounded way cooler.

A friend of mine sent me this and it is/was timely and sums up how I felt about New Year’s Resolutions this year.

I didn’t make any resolutions this year. I instead thought I should work on personal improvement overall… Not one area, but generally. I wasn’t clear on a process but it was starting with better health, and I started eating more in line with that. More vegetables, less eating out, more cooking from fresh, less meat, and smaller portions. I quit my gym membership, but that was a money thing. I wasn’t using it any more so paying was stupid. I’ve got home gym stuff I can use and it’s already paid for. I plan to continue the work on my NaNoWriMo novel, it needs work. Just lots of stuff to do, but no plan. I know me and that was, already a recipe for failure. If I don’t have a plan of attack I tend to flounder. It’s why I was so successful learning to run with the Couch to 5k Program. It was very structured. I do well with structure.

Enter Train your Monkeys.

An inner “monkey” is a drastically undeveloped part of yourself. You may think at it like a long term goal which was never attained. Or like a deeply buried dream you never dared to dream until the end. Or something you declared to yourself you’re going to follow up through, but never did.

A “monkey” is a goal frozen in its evolution. Like a genome which was never able to reach the human form. It was only strong enough to mimic its human shape but at the core level it’s just an unfinished project.

That is perfect! He’s got a previous post where he is going to Train 12 Monkeys this year, one a month. That’s a little more erm… that time line won’t work for what I’m going for with some of them, but I like the idea. I also like the idea that if I can pick a certain number and areas I can post progress as it happens… some sort of bloggy-accountability. So, look for me to be listing my monkeys soon.

One tool I know I’ll be using is the Seinfeld Calendar. First — I need to get a calendar. This is one where online isn’t as good. I want it on the wall and I want the big visible to everybody checks on it.

I’m excited. I’ve gone from vague numinous thoughts to something a little more concrete. Yeah. I know we’re all supposed to start on January 1st, but I was so incredibly sick then… it wasn’t a good time to start. I want this to be well thought out. So, first step is to name the Monkeys and post to you guys what my goals are and how I hope to measure them. I may or may not give the metrics and time lines on some of them… I haven’t decided yet. What I will do is have the post where I name the monkeys done by next Monday. Come back and see what the monkeys are.

You got any monkeys that need training? Let me know!  I’d love to hear about them!

This is part 2 in my short series of posts revolving around my job change. They’re a cross between a farewell letter to my managers and a helpful advice from a lame-duck district manager. I’m torn between looking forward to the challenge of it, missing the people involved with my old job, and obviously the income change will take some getting used to. When you go from being over 11 stores to being over 1 there’s a definite change in disposable income! This post will be about the priorities of a manager. My last post was a bit rambling, but was supposed to be about the manager needing to advocate for their store. My hope is that these posts give me a sense of closure to a job/position I’ve held for 10 years that I’m walking away from now.

Priorities.

We pay attention to the things our bosses pay attention to. Sure, the memos from the office and from our boss may talk about things like improved customer service, better cleaning, more consistent branding, and being friendlier, but what do the bosses talk to us about when they come to the store? What does the office send follow up things about? What are they looking at? What gets us in trouble? What are we accountable for?

If they talk about the customer service part of things only at employee meetings, but then the rest of the time we talk to them harp on us that our paperwork isn’t legible or how many widgets a week are we cranking out then we have to assume that customer service is something we talk about, but widget cranking is the important bit. If we get in more trouble for forgetting to fax a piece of paper whose information is already available on the computer somewhere else than we get into if we’re rude to a customer then it’s obvious where priorities are. They’re on the paper.

If the District Manager calls and expects the person answering the phone to drop everything, including the customer they’re waiting on to help them with whatever special project they’re working on that tells the person answering the phone that the customer is second to the DM. That’s the slippery slope we start down as DMs when we get full or ourselves. I tell my employees all the time, please, if you’ve got a customer put the phone down and wait on them. I’ll hold while you help them. I don’t even mind holding! What I mind is if I hear they’re doing both because then they’re doing neither very well. I’m not a fan of multi-tasking.

So, when you’re working the store and 12 boxes of who knows what comes in and you start ignoring customers to get the product checked in and put out you’re doing exactly what you have to do to keep your boss off your back. It says right in the rules & regs or policies & procedures, that we’re not to leave product sitting around un-checked in. The problem with that is… the trainees see that. The Sales Associates see it. Then they assume that their work, their assigned tasks, their widget polishing, or gadget alphabetizing is the same as receiving all those boxes… something that’s more important than the customer. We teach them that by what we do, not what we say. None of us say, “ignore the customer to get your work done,” instead, we do it while saying not to.

I ask that we hit the floor and offer to help customers periodically and get an amazing amount of push-back. It makes me mad to have Sales Associates tell me, “customers don’t want us to talk to them.” ARGH! When the SA’s say that I don’t want them to talk to me! That’s for sure lol. Don’t just stand behind the counter and wait for them to come to us but a lot of people do exactly that, saying, “Well, I’m polishing widgets, or ordering gadgets” so I don’t have time to wait on the customer. And that’s just not true! It’s so frustrating to me to see it. That’s when I go do it and then go back to what I was doing. I try and show, by example, that you can indeed stop doing something to go help customers. Helping customers shouldn’t be an interruption to your ‘real job.’ It should BE the real job!

I can tell you now, after having met with, visited with, and talked about priorities with the new bigger than big shot that priorities need to be customer first. Your new DM is that way too. We’ve been “getting better” for a long time now. It’s time to “get great” at it! Not just at employee meetings, but all the time. It’s what I intend to do in my new job to increase sales. I hope it works immediately. One of the areas we can continue to grow and beat the competition is outstanding customer service. I don’t mean to say that it’s not better today. It is. But better isn’t good enough any more. It really is time to get great. It’s also an area where first impressions are hugely important. If a DM walks in and sees customers on the floor and people checking in product or polishing widgets or whatever, and never talking to the customer they’re not going to know that you JUST got back from making the rounds, offering to help them all, and helping them. They’re going to only see that the customer is being ignored right now, at the moment they turned on the live surveillance cameras or walked in the back door. We have to not just make sure we are providing great customer service, but we actually have to look like it! Not just to the cameras, but to the customers.

When the customer walks in and sees us busy behind the counters and a floor full of people they immediately think we’re too busy to help them. If we all shout the greeting at them without looking up at them and making eye-contact that doesn’t mean anything. Shouting our greeting with offers to help before they’re even in the door all the way may meet the letter of the law in regards to greeting customers but it’s not the intent. It’s not a greeting or welcome that is meant. It’s a pro-forma going-through-the-motions greeting that is as insincere as it sounds, and as someone who’s heard lots of them… There are a LOT of bad sounding greetings out there.

I hear people now clamoring that the product must get checked in, and their store sees hundreds of people a day and how the heck do I expect them to pretend to sincerely greet each and every one of them? The thing is I don’t expect you to pretend to be sincere. I want you to feel it. I can’t make someone like customer service, but if you don’t you shouldn’t be doing it.

There will be the occasional customer you DO have to fake it with. The man with the nervous tick where he ALWAYS coughs into his hand before reaching into his pocket to get his cash. That guy, I have to pretend to like him. I don’t like him. I don’t like him at all! He makes me sick, sometimes literally as well as figuratively. But I greet him like I’m happy to see him because he’s my customer and I want him to stay my customer. The lion’s share of the customers, I am glad to see. And I never mind a break from receiving product to talk to customers. It’s a break from the receiving. I’d rather wait on customers than work on receiving product any day of the week. I was a shipping clerk at a warehouse for a year or so. It was so boring I quit. The other end of that, receiving clerk… not my cup of tea at all. I’m in this job for the customers. If you’re not then maybe it’s time for you to consider a different job too.