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No one Trusted Me in My First Management Job, They Hated Me.
Learn three things that I should have done, but didn’t
I was twenty and had no idea how to manage myself, let alone people two or three times older than me.
My hazy idea of outstanding leadership was informed by six weeks of so-called management training. Trapped in a hotel and far from home, I soaked it up.
One leadership gem that rankled was the practice of getting the sales assistants to run around doing things I could easily have done myself.
For example:
“If a customer wants something from the storeroom, don’t get it yourself. Ask a sales assistant to run and fetch it.”
The stockroom was three floors up, and the sales assistants weren’t impressed.
This advice was prevalent in the 1980s and meant to separate leaders from the team and underline their superiority. We had uniforms that reflected our rank and were addressed as Miss, Mrs., and Mr.
No first names for us!
Thankfully, things have changed, and now managers are encouraged to behave in a way that builds trust.
Because without trust, there is no team, only a group of people working on loosely connected tasks in the same…
