THERE IS A HELL! - - - IT IS CALLED RETAIL RETAIL – DEAD END CAREER? | Page 12

RETAIL – DEAD END CAREER?
this, and micromanage: a clear sign of insecurity and confusion over their role and
yours.

 They prefer intimidation to leadership.

If you have a gun, the fastest way to get someone to do something for you is to
threaten them with it. But if you take away the gun, you have no power. However if
you take the time to convince someone to do something for good reasons, those
reasons can last no matter how armed or unarmed you are. A person, who has
confused intimidation with persuasion, or leadership, behaves poorly all the time. They
rely on their guns, not their minds, which enslaves the people who work for them out
of using their minds either.

 Their life sucks.

 They lose their way.

What percentages of people are miserable in the
corporate world? I think 20 - 30% is a safe bet. If
you’re miserable, you tend to inflict your misery on
those who have less power than you do. If your life
sucks badly enough you won’t even notice how rude
you are to waiters, assistants, and sub-ordinates. It
may be nothing personal, or even work related,
these people simply have a volcano of negative
emotions that must escape somewhere, often in
eruptions that they can not control. Just be glad
you’re not their spouse or offspring.

Management is disorienting. You are not in the real world in the same way front line
workers are. Everything is Meta. Decisions become abstractions. People are numbers.
Getting lost in middle management is common. Unless they find a guiding light to
keep the bearings, and stay low to the ground, good people get lost. It’s smart when
taking on a new role to ask someone closer to the ground to be your sanity check.
Telling you when the front line thinks you’re not the same guy anymore.

 Promotion chasing.

As you get further from front line work, the goals of promotion become clearer than
the goals of the projects. Often what’s right for the project, and the people working
on it, isn’t lined up with what’s going to get a manager promoted. This creates a
moral dilemma, do what’s right for the team, or do what’s best for me. By spending
more time with other managers than with front line workers, it’s easy to forget where
the high ground is.

 Their management chain is toxic.

If you are a manager, and your boss is inflicting blame, disorder or pain on you, there
are two choices. Either pass the pain on down, or suck it up and shield your team
from the pain. Will you pass the blame on to your team, or take all the heat? The
latter is much harder to do than the former, and the former will often be taken as
being a jerk manager. Even if no solution is possible, one gutsy thing to say is “I don’t
agree with this either, but I was unable to convince my boss, so we’re doing it
anyway”. This takes guts as it makes you seem powerless. You must choose between
seeming powerless vs. seeming like a jerk/moron, and the latter often wins.

dodie ste®eo p®odu©tion ™

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