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.

In Frank Herbert’s Dune the Litany Against Fear went:

I must not fear
Fear is the mind-killer.
Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.
I will face my fear.
I will permit it to pass over me and through me.
And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path.
Where the fear has gone there will be nothing.
Only I will remain.

When I first encountered that I was at an impressionable age. I thought then, and still believe to a certain extent, that Fear is the great enemy (Yes, I put a capital letter there on purpose.) Fear clouds our minds and makes us act irrationally. People leap from burning buildings out of fear of burning. Drowning people, afraid of drowning will take their rescuer with them to the bottom out of fear. Fear makes us do things we wouldn’t normally do. It takes us beyond ourselves to a primal state where an older, less rational, more reactive part of our brains makes decisions for us, and they’re not always the best decisions.

The examples I gave, burning, drowning, those are extreme examples of acute fear of an acute, extreme nature. What about day to day fear. Not the mind-numbing cold sweat nightmare fear that causes us to sit bolt upright in bed, heart racing.

But the low level, constant chronic rather than acute fears:

• of failure at work
• of loss of job
• of disappointing our loved ones
• of being downsized
• of that pain in our side? Is it a heart attack?
• of violence in our schools? Are our kids safe?

These fears live with us, riding on our backs every day, whispering into our ears during the quiet times in traffic. They can be a steady dialogue that we have with ourselves. The common name for them is stress. But that’s just because stress is a manly name. It’s socially acceptable to be stressed, but who wants to admit to being afraid?

So. When you’re stressed, or when you’re afraid, use some of these tips from Diet Blog for dealing with stress. They’re good for you. You’ll be better for it. Remember how I said in the outset that people acting out of fear don’t make the best decisions? It’s also true of people under constant low level stress.

From: Diet Blog: 17 Simple Ways to Release Stress

Here are some strategies for dealing with stress.

1. Use deep breathing - breathe in through your nose down to your stomach, hold your breath, and breathe out through your mouth.
2. Get aerobic exercise daily.
3. Take a walk, even a very short one when you’’re upset.
4. Practice yoga or tai chi or progressive relaxation.
5. Enjoy the soothing aspects of water -– swim or take a bath or a shower.
6. Make time to talk to friends and family members.
7. Pet and play with an animal.
8. Listen to or play uplifting music.
9. Read an inspiring book, sing a song, recite a poem.
10. Spend time in nature.
    …

There are more obviously… seven more or the title of the article wouldn’t make any sense at all would it? Practice as many of these as you have time for as often as you can. At least two a day. You’ll make better decisions. You’ll be a happier person, and you’re quantity and quality of work will improve. You’re friends/family and employees/employer will be glad you did. (FWIW: The ones in red are the ones I try and do every day. I get a lot of grief about listening to KLOVE but it’s calming.)

Again, with apologies:

I must not fear
Fear is the mind-killer.
Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.

Such a great book. It’s about time to read it again I think.