Managers - Part XXV - You're Not Royalty

Lately I've been listening to a podcast about the history of Rome. The last few episodes have been about the early empire period and contrast has been drawn between the emperors who wanted power in order to accomplish something, run things more efficiently, build up the army, building projects, etc, and those who wanted power just so that they could be the guy who could tell everyone else what to do. It got me thinking how people who aspire to management positions could be compared to these two types of leaders way. 

I remember when I was a Store Director for a local grocery store and having a discussion with one of my department managers about holiday scheduling. His position was that once you have attained a certain position you were entitled to certain perks, when it came to holidays, you had earned, due to your position, the best schedule, holidays off, etc. I took a different position. As a leader, you should be leading, and part of leading was being there during the busy times. As Uncle Ben said, with great power comes great responsibility. Now this didn't mean that I scheduled myself all the "bad" shifts, or worked all day, every holiday, but that I led by example. 

Store Directors with whom I worked over the years were all over the map on this. I worked with one boss who worked six 12-hours days and a half day on Sunday, and who never took a holiday off. I knew of other managers who would take every holiday off, leave early on busy days like Christmas Eve or the days before Independence Day or Thanksgiving, leaving it to subordinates to run the show. I tried to take a middle path, spreading out the tough shifts and late nights among not only the "new guys", but requiring that the veterans, including myself would share in the responsibility of covering the store during the busy times. Holidays like Thanksgiving Day or July Fourth, which were fairly slow on the holiday itself, generally saw all the managers working a quarter shift to allow everybody to enjoy at least part of the day. 

Those of you who have slogged through all two dozen of these blog posts know that I don't view "good management" as being "one of the boys" or "doing things" rather than "getting things done" by way of training, supervision and delegation, but that you can't be an effective leader if you are absent. 

Start at the beginning: Part I
 

Antisemitism

If you're engaging in antisemitism, cut that shit out!

Bigotry against Jews never really goes away. It sinks into the mud and shoots up regularly for the ignorant and the hateful to engage in anew. 

Opposition to how Israel treats the Palestinians is not antisemitism. It's not even remotely arguable that the bombing of Gaza back to the Stone Age, or the stealing of Palestinian land by Settlers in the West Bank is defensible. But pro-Palestinian protests over the last few years have taken a decidedly anti-Jewish tone. As if Jewish people in the United States and worldwide have any influence on what the government of Israel does. I don't recall any widespread prejudice against WASPs when the U.K. was committing atrocities in Northern Ireland; Russian-Americans aren't subject to hatred based on what Russia is doing in Ukraine; Chinese-Americans aren't blamed for China's actions in Tibet and against the Uyghurs. But the bigots will make an exception for Jews. (For that matter, there is no suggestion that any other nation on Earth, no matter how terrible it treats its people, should not exist. But some activists make an exception for Israel — but that's a discussion for another time)

Another thread in the tapestry of modern antisemitism is the fact that Jeffrey Epstein, the twenty-first century's devil incarnate, was Jewish. Some of his correspondence speaks disparagingly of non-Jews. The term goy (plural goyim) is used — and people who are inclined to see nefarious Jewish conspiracies see the word as a slur, or a secret code word, when it simply means "non-Jew", or "gentile". The fact that someone named Rothschild appears in the Epstein files numerous times, with the Rothschilds being the favorite bogeymen of antisemitic conspiracies of yore, just adds fuel to the fire. 

Despite the support that many fundamentalists and White Christian Nationalists seem to have for Israel, they mainly do so because they believe the "End Times" that they have decoded from the Biblical Book of Revelation involves a revival of the nation of Israel. They don't like individual Jews, seeing them at best as people who aren't up to date in the religion department, and at worst, anti-Christ and Satanic. 

What is more disturbing than the MAGA crowd and their religious buddies expressing their antisemitism is the number of self-described progressives who buy into it. I have seen rationales for antisemitism, sharing articles that make the Protocols of The Elders of Zion seem reasonable, or quoting Jewish right wing bigots as if they represented all Jews. People need to vet their sources of information more thoroughly. 

Don't buy into the bigots' propaganda. 

So, You Want to Join a Cult - Part XXIV

Since Part XVI came out just before Christmas 2025, I decided to skip ahead to Part XXIII - The Holidays back in December. No need to rehash it, so we're going right to Part XXIV

When we got to Kearney we were, quite frankly, worn out, and were looking forward to August, when we would be done with this commitment, and with each other. One bright spot was that Kearney, being a college town, lacked the small town antipathy to outsiders that we encountered in Sidney. We got jobs where no one knew who we were, or that we were in a cult, and no one cared what we were doing. 

One of the things that WOWs supposed to be doing to "move The Word" was running Power for Abundant Living (PFAL) classes. During our time in Sidney we had convinced just two people to take this class, Randy, a young man with a mysterious background and Tom, a forty-ish man who we found out later hung around because he was having sex with Rosemarie! Both of these men followed us to Kearney. There were also several Kearney people who had been signed up for PFAL by two Way women who had been assigned to Kearney before us, but were to be reassigned to Lincoln. At first we were pretty excited about running a class. Getting a class together was viewed in Way-world as prima facie evidence that you were "believing". WOWs, or even Way people in general, were viewed as spiritual slackers if they couldn't convince seven people to plunk down $100 to take PFAL. (My memory is a bit fuzzy, but a one point the "donation" was reduced to $40 — it may have been during that year) 

The pressure was really on WOWs, since that was our primary job: witness for 8 hours a day, 6 days a week. If you couldn't run a class, surely the problem wasn't God, surely the problem wasn't God's Word, surely the problem wasn't The Class — this left just one suspect as the source of the lack of outreach success: you! This was a central tenet in The Way's circular reasoning, lack of results was never due to the plan, or the leadership being wrong, the problem was that you weren't believing. In a world where people ask questions, one might have asked why the leaders who assigned us to small town Nebraska, who supposedly made these assignments based on divine revelation, didn't know that these towns weren't interested in what we had to offer, but that kind of honest inquiry was discouraged in The Way. Five of the seven people in our PFAL class were signed up by others, but we got to run the class, so the spiritual pressure was off. 

Once we were done with the class, we kind of sleep-walked through the rest of the year. I've mentioned before how obeying "leadership" was a central plank in The Way's platform. Out on the WOW field, our leader Steve, who we were supposed to believe was inspired by God to lead us properly, was a twenty year old who was overly impressed with his own position as leader and more concerned with seducing women, both Way women and those whom we were supposed to be "sharing the Word" with, than actually leading. At one point he was spending time alone with a woman whose husband worked nights. (The Way was was big on doing things two-by-two, and for good reason!) When the husband found out about this there were threats, but Steve extricated himself from the situation without getting beaten up. 

One series of events that spotlighted his incompetence, dishonesty and manipulation as a leader involved finances. One of the things that was required of a WOW was working a part-time job. Everyone was to contribute to the "family fund" which was used for common expenses, with the details to be worked out by each "family". Three of us gotten jobs around town in various restaurants. Steve got a "job" doing work around our rental house, including putting in a new lawn. Steve was paid via a decrease in our rent equal to what he and the landlord agreed would be his monthly wages. Since Steve wasn't actually receiving any money directly from the landlord, he was given money from our "family fund" equal to his wages, less whatever his contribution to the common expenses would be. The problem was that Steve never did any of the work that he was contracted to do. He slept in, or hung out with some of the local Way women while the rest of us were at work. Eventually our landlord realized that no work was being done and demanded that we pay back the rent credit that ostensibly covered Steve's wages. Of course we no longer had the money. To avoid being evicted Steve convinced his father to lend us the money, to be paid back before our term was up in August. I can't recall if Steve got a real job after that, or how close to the end of the year this was, but just before we left Kearney for good, we had amassed enough surplus in our common funds to pay Steve's father back. However, Steve's dad allegedly gave the money to Steve. We weren't able to confirm this since we did not have his father's contact information. The three of us had ended up subsidizing Steve's months-long indolence. So much for leadership.

I started this segment by saying how we were looking forward to being done with our commitment...and each other. The Way promoted the WOW experience as being likely to be the best year of your life. It was depicted as the opportunity to live and work with a team of likeminded believers, all with a common goal, blessed by God. We were assured that the assignments were divinely guided. The company line was that each four-person family was selected for optimum compatibility and our location was where there were sure to be people hungry for God's Word. I think my description of our time in Sidney debunked the idea that the location was ideal. Our interpersonal relationships were far from ideal as well. We really couldn't stand each other. On good days we could tolerate each others' presence, at best. Although we were supposed to be spending our days in pairs, actively recruiting converts, we hardly ever spent any time together.  

I don't think anyone questions the part of the WOW commitment where you're supposed to witness for eight hours a day six days a week. I know we never did it in Sidney. One of the logistical problems of a four-person team all working part-time jobs and still attempting to do things as a group was that it's close to impossible to coordinate everyone's schedule. Someone would get off work at 11:00 and wait around until someone else got off work. Then there's the lack of people to witness to. The population was only around 5,000. At an average of 3.5 people per household, that's about 1400 doors to be knocked on. That's 350 doors per person, or 700 doors per pair. Even at a leisurely 10 doors per day per team, we would have knocked on every door in 12 weeks. At first we made an effort, we knocked on doors, we went to bars and diners, we mingled in public. But by the time we got to Kearney we were burned out. And we certainly made no effort to try to convert anyone. Once the PFAL class that we ran was over, we effectively quiet quit and skated along until August. 

None of us wanted to admit that we just weren't doing what we were supposed to be doing. The three non-leaders, Gail, Rosemarie and I, were disillusioned by Steve's lack of leadership. He seemed to be happy to sit around at night watching television at the home of Doreen and Janet, two local Way women. Gail spent a lot of her time hanging out with Freddie, a local Way guy. Rosemarie and I spent the afternoons at the lake and hit the bars in the evening. I consumed a lot of beer and had a succession of Jack Daniels bottles in my bedroom. 

Finally August arrived. Steve, as a member of the Way Corps, left a week early to participate in "Corps Week". Gail, Rosemarie and I headed out of Kearney for the last time. I dropped off some of my belonging in Lincoln, where I would be living the following year, and drove straight through to Way headquarters in Ohio. We got robbed at the hotel we were staying at. The tent that my cousin John sent via some New York Way people had no tent pegs. It rained heavily on the last night and my tent flooded. We received our blue WOW pins in a recognition ceremony at the first night of The Rock of Ages. I never saw Steve again. It was 21 years before I saw Gail again on a road trip to the East Coast. Rosemarie was my roommate for six months in Lincoln, and then we never saw each other again. I spent a week in New York with my parents before heading back to Nebraska. 

Continuing my pattern of ignoring red flags and subsequently doubling down, towards the end of this year, instead of cutting my losses and leaving The Way, I decided to apply to enter The Way Corps, The Way's alleged leadership training program. In the meantime I would participate in a "WOW Vet" outreach program in Lincoln. 

Start from the beginning: Part I

An Agnostic's Look at The Bible - Part XXIV - Sola Scriptura

In the previous installment I brought up the concept of Apostolic Succession and how it related to the canon of scripture, i.e. the standard that determined what constituted The Bible. 

For centuries the leadership of the dominant Christian Church, the Catholic Church, insisted that the common people couldn't be trusted to even read The Bible, let alone understand it. They reserved that privilege for themselves, not permitting Bibles to be printed in any language except Latin, a language which no one spoke any longer. People were executed for translating The Bible into the local vernacular. Things changed when the Protestant Reformation started in the Sixteenth Century. The ostensive goals of the Reformation were twofold: to facilitate translation of The Bible into the local vernaculars — English, German, etc., — and to promote the idea that it was the text of The Bible itself, scripture alone, (sola scriptura) and not church hierarchy, that determined Christian doctrine and practice. On the first point it was successful, on the second, it's a mixed record. 

There's a belief among many people that "the patriarchy", or some other conspiracy, "changed" The Bible in order to advance their own viewpoints and prejudices. There's some truth in that, but only some,  it's not that simple. For several hundred years there was no "The Bible". As I discussed in the article about Other Christianities, there were several competing versions of Christianity as Jesus' message spread throughout the Roman world and beyond. Each of these "Christianities" developed their own leadership hierarchy, including the group that evolved into the Catholic/Orthodox Church. They each thought (or at least claimed) that they were the only ones who had faithfully passed on Jesus' teachings. In some cities the different sects competed for members, in others one Christianity predominated. One, the Catholic/Orthodox Church, got big and widespread enough, and was the dominant form of Christianity in the two capitols of the Roman Empire, Rome and Constantinople. 

Most of these sects, as far as we know, wrote gospels, epistles, treatises, apocalypses, and maybe even graphic novels, to bolster their version of what Jesus taught. Most of them were attributed to the original apostles since claiming such authorship tended to make them appear more authoritative. A lot of them, including the writings that made their way into The Bible, contain rebuttals of competing doctrines and attacks against competing prophets and teachers. Some writings couldn't definitively be traced back to any specific group, but were used more broadly. It wasn't until Marcion, the founder of one of the Christianities that has not survived until present day, put together his own canon of scripture that the dominant group attempted their own. 

Marcion's canon contained one gospel, The Gospel of the Lord, an edited and shortened version of the Gospel of Luke. It also contained edited versions of ten of the Pauline Epistles: Galatians, First and Second Corinthians, Romans, First and Second Thessalonians, Laodiceans (which may have been Ephesians under a different name), Colossians, Philemon and Philippians. But not Hebrews, Titus, or First and Second Timothy, which are all considered forgeries. Catholic/Orthodox leaders had over time begun to use most of the books that now make up The Bible, but it wasn't until 393 CE that the current 27 book canon was made official, although the Codex Vaticanus, which was printed in 350 CE has the complete canon. 

Were some books "taken out" that espoused ideas like the equality of women or fringe ideas about spirituality? No, because there wasn't anything to take them out of yet. However it's indisputable that the Catholic/Orthodox Church Council made deliberate decisions to include or exclude writings that they didn't think aligned with the doctrines that had evolved over three centuries. From that point on, other than the books that we know as the Apocrypha, nothing was removed from The Bible. (The Apocryphal books were removed from the Old Testament) And that's the way it remained for another 1200 years. 

Now we finally get to sola scriptura. 

The Sixteenth Century Protestant Reformation, as I mentioned earlier, had two main goals. Translating The Bible into the languages of the people was accomplished. But the reason for that was so that Christians would no longer be dependent upon church leaders, upon priests and popes, to tell them what The Bible said, to decide for everybody what God's will was. In theory, it succeeded at that as well. (A third aspect was the fact that European monarchs now had the option of disentangling themselves from The Catholic Church) But did it really succeed, at least in the way the reformers thought?

Indisputably we have The Bible available in virtually every language on Earth. Any literate person can pick it up and read it. Bible study aids are available to assist in comparing to the original languages. No one has to depend on the priests and popes. But do we really rely upon sola scriptura, scripture alone? I would argue that we don't. Foundational to my opinion is that the scriptura that we have available to us has been filtered through, first, the people who wrote the gospels and epistles in the first place. The very earliest is the first Pauline Epistle to the Thessalonians, written around 20 years after Jesus' death. You could argue, I suppose that Paul and the anonymous and pseudonymous authors of the rest of the New Testament were inspired by God, but as an agnostic, I don't but it. It's their opinion. Next, the men who decided what writings would comprise The Bible are an additional filter. Who knows if they left out inspired writings or included fraudulent ones? And modern day Protestants might be surprised that the scripture that they should alone depend on was decided upon by the Catholic Church which they think is unbiblical! During Luther's time there was spirited debate about whether several canonical books should be removed. It is well known among biblical scholars that several of the epistles attributed to Paul are in fact forgeries and were written by an unknown author or authors. It's not a secret that copyists made changes to the originals. Translators, no matter how diligent, add another layer of doubt. How can we say whether what we have today faithfully represents the originals, or even if those originals represent the hypothetical "God's will"?

We can't. 

The whole concept of sola scriptura is based on the false assumption that we can easily determine what God wanted to get across if only we could read it ourselves in an accurate translation.  Even if we assume that what we have is an accurate translation of a faithful reproduction of original texts that themselves represent the only written information that God intended humans to have, it certainly isn't clear throughout. If that were so, there wouldn't be so many different interpretations based on the same text? 

On so many different subjects Christians disagree, all the while urging those with whom they disagree to "just read the Bible". 

Workin' Man - Part XXIV - The Misfits and the Consultants

Well, I get up at seven, yeah

And I go to work at nine
I got no time for livin'
Yes, I'm workin' all the time

It seems to me
I could live my life
A lot better than I think I am
I guess that's why they call me
They call me the workin' man

'Cause I get home at five o'clock
And I take myself out an ice cold beer
Always seem to be wondering'
Why there's nothin' goin' down here

I guess that's why they call me
They call me the workin' man

"Workin' Man" - Words & Music by Lee & Lifeson 

 B&R Corporate definitely viewed the stores hierarchically. The Super Savers were at the top of the pyramid, with the busier Russ's Markets in the middle, and the small and money-losing stores at the bottom. ALPS, and later Save Best, were below the bottom. Their idea was that the operational difficulty correlated with sales volume and square footage. The stores on the lower end of the continuum were viewed almost as training locations for Store Directors and department managers. The truth was that the smaller stores were in many ways more challenging than the larger stores. Part of this was the higher turnover in the smaller stores. Because managers were always on the lookout for better paying opportunities, the smaller stores always had a lot of managerial churn and unfailingly had the least experienced managers. This included the key position of Assistant Store Director (ASD). Despite the unwritten rule that Store Directors would "do their time" in a smaller store before being allowed to manage a larger store, this wasn't applied to Assistant Store Directors. Promising department managers wouldn't even apply to Assistant Store Director positions in a small Russ's, waiting for a Super Saver opening. This left the pool of applicants for Russ's assistant positions disappointingly shallow. Department managers were notoriously difficult to keep as well. They were often on the lookout for better bonus prospects. 

For some reason my first 18 months at the Van Dorn Russ's the management positions were pretty stable. Part of it was that most of them were happy with the small store and didn't want anything bigger. Part of it was that most of them had some kind of HR target on their backs that made them unsuitable for promotion opportunities. My Assistant Store Director, Tim, had been a Store Director for another company — he eventually moved on to a bigger store and later became a Store Director of a Super Saver, but for reasons of his own, never applied for promotion during my first two years despite there being several openings. While during my last 18 months corporate took several of my managers away in anticipation of closing the store and the expansion and remodel at 66th and O, I only lost one manager through corporate raiding during my early days. My Meat Manager was transferred out to a bigger store, and as usual, they didn't replace him — I had to run an ad and interview for one myself. I had a Bakery Manager quit after I was at Van Dorn for just a few months, but it ended up being an opportunity for a young assistant department manager to step up, and for me to hone my training and coaching skills. 

Alex had been the Assistant Deli Manager, but wanted to transfer out because he didn't get along with Kathy, the Deli Manager. (The corporate office Deli Director was adamant that we refer to the Delis as "Delicatessens". Of course this is the full name from which "Deli" is derived, but he insisted that in big cities like New York, no one called them "delis". As a native New Yorker, I did not find this to be true) We had an opening for Assistant Bakery Manager and Alex was transferred. Before he could get much training in Bakery operations the Bakery Manager left the company. 

Some positions in the company attracted people with a more generalist skill set — grocery, dairy frozen, general merchandise etc., but you really had to know something about how to bake bread and fry doughnuts to be able to effectively run a Bakery department. There were NO applicants. Eventually, with the agreement of the Bakery Director and Operations VP, I decided to promote Alex to the position, despite his lack of experience. It was a mixed experiment. There were definitely areas that were sub par — he really had no mentor to teach him the "ways of the Bakery" other than occasional visits from the corporate Bakery Director, but he did a good job of keeping the shelves full and the team motivated. 

A position that I lost before I even started was HR Coordinator. The previous HRC had been selected for an Assistant Store Director position, and left Van Dorn on the day I started. This was when the experiment of eliminating most of the HRC positions and turning over in-store HR responsibilities to one of two ASDs. This meant that many HRCs were applying for ASD positions who had no management or grocery experience. Donna, the corporate HR Director told me that she would fill the position, presumably by transferring someone in, but when I followed up with her a month later, she denied ever saying that. (Donna was a habitual gaslighter — she lied about personnel issues and pay rates on numerous occasions) I went through several months of sharing HRCs with other stores, but my store's needs were always secondary. Eventually I got permission to hire for a hybrid position: HRC/Front End Manager. I had a front end manager, so I had the difficult decision of telling her that we were eliminating her position. I had the more difficult task of telling her that while she could apply for the new position, I did not consider her qualified for the HR part of the job. (There are always extremely unqualified applicants for HR positions, since no one seems to know what they really do!) I had two applicants who I considered qualified.  Tim, who was a clerk in the corporate HR department, and Joe, who had been an evening grocery supervisor for me, but had transferred to another store. Tim, on the strength of his HR knowledge, was my first choice. When I offered him the position, he did not accept, stating that he didn't think he was ready. I never understood people who did this. I can understand when someone turns down a job because the compensation is too low, or there were requirements that did not come out in the interview, but why would you apply for a job that you didn't think you were ready for? Well, the reason was that Donna talked him out of it. She had talked him down in very harsh terms when I asked for her for her input. I was shocked that she would speak so disparagingly about someone on her team. I can only assume that she talked him out of it, although no one ever admitted it. So I hired Joe for the position. If I remember correctly he was in that position through the end of my second year. Joe ended up transferring to another store as an Assistant Store Director. 

One of the things I tried to look for in potential management hires was someone who liked managing and was good at it. It sounds obvious, but most people who apply for management positions do it only because it pays more. Of course, a bigger paycheck is a legitimate reason for wanting to advance, but without the skill and desire to lead people and the organizational skill needed to administer a department, you're not going to get a good manager. If someone applied to me for a management job I would not consider them if their only reason was a bigger paycheck. I remember a guy who I promoted to Assistant Produce Manager, mainly due to his familiarity with the department and his people skills. It didn't pay that well and he was submitting applications for management positions for various departments and other stores every week. I tried to get him to narrow his focus, to pick an area that he "had a passion for" and set his goals in a less scattershot way. The next application that he sent out, for a Deli Manager position, included the statement "I have a passion for the Deli". Sometimes you just have to chuckle. He was hired, but quit a few months later to take a better paying job outside the company. 

In a previous post I mentioned a management class called "Managing Management Time" (MMT). One of my projects that I initiated during my weekly department managers' meetings was teaching the principles that I had learned in that class. One of the key ideas from MMT was the principle of "Whose Monkey Is It?" A "monkey" was a task or responsibility. As a manager you had to recognize what things were your responsibility and what was someone trying to get you to do their job. As a Store Director, my job did not involve the scheduling or allocation of resources in each department, this was the department manager's job. Of course I could provide guidance, or assist in solving problems, but operationally the day-to-day running of a department wasn't my "monkey". This was part of an effort to foster independence, not only among the management team, but the non-management employees. Another principle was the five levels of supervision, outlined in this article. 

The Five Levels of Managing Subordinates:

1. Wait until being told before doing anything
2. Ask what to do before doing anything
3. Make independent decisions regarding what to do, but check with a manager before actually doing it
4. Make independent decisions regarding what to do, informing the manager after the fact what was done
5. Make independent decisions regarding what to do, routine reporting in only

#1, it should be fairly obvious to see, should only apply to brand-new people who barely know what their job is, let alone how to do it; although I have seen this behavior in people who had been in a job long enough to know the basics. Even the newest employee will quickly move to #2 and ask "What do I do now?" after completing a task.

#2 is where most entry-level employees spend most of their day. The boss gives them a to-do list, the employees complete the list and then go ask what to do next. This is why I have never been a big supporter of to-do lists, it limits the employee to a certain set of tasks and doesn't encourage them to think

#3 is where you want your employees to be fairly quickly. Rather than give them a list, give them a vision of how you want things to be when they are done. We had a position that was called "grocery clerk". These employees, usually high school students working their first job, were responsible for bringing in stray shopping carts, filling displays, straightening out the aisles, cleaning bathrooms and overall customer service. An "okay" clerk did the items on the list and then asked a manager what to do, or reverted to #1 and didn't do anything! A good grocery clerk knew that his job included all the aforementioned things and organized his time to get them all done, prioritizing as needed, usually checking with the manager if he was going outside or taking a break. 

#4 is the goal for your employees. To extend the grocery clerk example, a manager didn't need a great grocery clerk to check in except occasionally during a shift, and trusted the clerk to do what needed to be done without being repeatedly told. This is also where you want all supervising or managing employees to be. 

#5 is where very few people have the confidence to be, and what very few managers have the trust to allow. This is where true delegation takes place. Delegation is where an employee knows what needs to be done and does it, secure in the knowledge that they have the responsibility and the authority to get it done. Delegation from the manager's perspective is where the manager has done sufficient training and instruction for the subordinate and has enough confidence and trust in the subordinates ability to allow that independence. It is the opposite of assigning, which is what takes place in #1 and #2, and a little bit in #3.

I forbade my management team from operating at Level Three or lower, and directed them to shoot for Level Five. This was uncomfortable for some of them, some people just want to be told what to do. I believe this instruction had the effect of causing my managers to think before coming to me to solve their problems and to have possible solutions ready. It also motivated them to encourage their team to function more independently.  

B&R loved consultants. They brought in one guy who ran some Food 4 Less stores in California who walked around our stores insulting the Store Directors and referring to our "chicken shit" displays. Kelly C, a long time employee and manager, called him out in a meeting where he claimed to compare his prices to Walmart on all his prices. Mr. Consultant's bullshit became more and more obvious every time he opened his mouth. His suggestions were abandoned soon after he went away. Then there was the "Better Basics" guy. He had previously worked for another consulting company (I can't remember the name) from which he lifted all of their ideas and repackaged them as Better Basics. This guy was a bit more subtle in his condescension — no overt insults anyway — but he thought he had all the answers. I remember one time him telling me we had the "wrong" Greek yogurt, as if there was such as things as the "right" Greek yogurt. Like most consultants his main goal was to draw things out so he could get paid for more consulting. It took 18 months for his Better Basics Bakery team to change the recipe for hard rolls. His alleged sense of humor was misogynistic and crude. He made a sexually suggestive "joke" to a female member of the team at one of the meetings; complaints by her and a Store Director who were present fell on deaf ears, as did a childish response to the word "retard" (stress on the second syllable, in the sense of "inhibit", referring to an aspect of the proofing process). B&R, while coming down hard on employees who were accused of sexual harassment, tolerated it from vendors, salesmen and consultants, presumably because there was no legal liability if it wasn't an employee who was doing the harassing. (Refer to an earlier story about the HVAC guy, fired by his own company for making sexual comments to a teenage girl, but was subsequently hired by Jane Raybould to remodel a store). But the worst consultant of all was Harold Lloyd.

Harold did a lot of presentations on various grocery-related topics for managers, as well as for all employees. He facilitated conferences among similar companies from different areas who were not directly competing ("Share Groups"). He was a dynamic speaker. He knew how to get your attention and keep it. I learned a lot about how to present information in meetings from him. He also had a lot of practical ideas that were simple and obvious and easy to implement. The first time in a Harold Lloyd presentation was magical. You had dozens of new ideas to take back to your store, and actually felt smarter. The problem was that every Harold Lloyd presentation was almost exactly the same. The elements might be switched around, put in different order, but no matter what the topic was, fresh departments, sanitation, marketing — you got the same information every...single...time. A few of us had been sent out to Des Moines for a two-day seminar facilitated by Lloyd. A few months later a few Store Directors and Assistants drove out to Gretna for a short presentation by him. Dan, a fellow attendee at the Des Moines sessions, and I brought our handouts from the Des Moines seminar. Harold must have been fielding criticism about his repetitiveness and started out with a rant about people who criticized him for it. He used some profane, and frankly disgusting language to counter his critics. He then began his presentation...using all the same information that Dan and I had in our notes from Des Moines. 

This wasn't the last time I encountered Harold Lloyd. He had been facilitating a program whereby various committees would focus on specific areas in which to improve the company. A day-long meeting with the corporate directors and the committee chairs would be followed by a presentation for all the managers throughout the company in a movie theater. The day before the first meeting Operations VP Tom Schulte showed up at Van Dorn with Harold in tow and asked if they could attend my managers' meeting which was just about to start. I ran my meeting the way I always did. I always tried to keep my meetings short and to the point. Only items that applied to everyone were on the agenda, (and I always had a written agenda) problems specific to only one or two departments were handled "off-line". At the time I was also spending a few minutes at the end of the meeting teaching principles from Managing Management Time. The meetings tended to be 30 minutes, sometimes less — we all had things to do and some managers were the only ones scheduled in their departments that day. I always ended my meeting with "Does anyone have anything for the group?" rather than the more common "Does anyone have any questions?". I had learned this from a previous Store Director — "anything for the group" could include any contributions, not just questions, and often resulted in great insights from people. At the end of the meeting Harold asked if he could address the group for about ten minutes; I was a bit skeptical about what he could offer, but felt boxed in, so I agreed nonetheless. His contribution lasted well over twenty minutes and may have been close to half an hour and consisted mainly of criticisms of how I ran a meeting. He started with claiming that my meeting was too short, it should be an hour...at a minimum. I can't recall every other specific criticism, but I wondered how closely he had really been listening and not just regurgitating an oft-repeated speech when he said I shouldn't have ended my meeting with "Does anyone have any questions?" — which wasn't what I said. As I looked around the room I saw how uncomfortable my managers were with the attack. Once we were done I stalked out of the meeting room and headed for my office. Two of my managers followed me down and asked me if I was okay. I replied that I was going to leave the store for lunch to cool off.

When I returned an hour later Tom and Harold were still in the store. I encountered them in one of the aisles and Harold asked me what my problem was with his remarks (I was very obviously angry at his words) — unwilling to get into an argument in earshot of employees and customers I asked him and Tom to come to my office. Once behind the closed door he once again asked me what I was so mad about, and I responded that he was a guest in my meeting and started right out criticizing and attacking. His rejoinder, if I had been a few decades younger, might have earned him a punch in the face "Don't lie!" He said, "it wasn't the first thing I said", retreating into literalism (the literal first thing was likely something like "thanks for having me at this meeting). I stepped into his "bubble" and snarled "Do NOT call me a liar" and once again, he hid behind literalism "I didn't say you were a liar, I said you lied". (Why do people think that's somehow better?) There was a lot of shouting after that. Tom attempted to insert himself a couple of times, but decided to let us both blow off steam. Eventually, after I explained several different ways why how he conducted himself was offensive to me and insulting to my team, he aplogized. He offered to speak to my management team, but I refused his offer — I didn't want him anywhere near my people. I found out that he relayed this incident, without mentioning my name or what store it took place in, during the day-long meeting at the corporate office. He painted himself as the hero of the story, someone willing to admit his mistakes and humbly apologize. A few people figured out that he was talking about me and heard the true story from me. The following day, in the all-managers presentation he repeated most of the same stories and examples that I had heard at Des Moines, Gretna, and several other presentations. 

He was still full of shit. 

The funny part was after the dust settled, Wes, the Dairy-Frozen Manager asked me if I believed in the magic of taking something personal from someone in order to curse them, or something like that. I told him that I believed something similar. Wes smiled and said "I've got his pen!"

Start with Part I

Managers - Part XXIV - What Do You Expect of People?

A lot of attention lately has been given to workers walking out of jobs because they have had enough. Enough of abusive customers, enough of managers who don't support them, and enough of poor working conditions. I completely understand. Entry-level workers have been told for years that if they didn't like an aspect of their jobs they should just quit, so that's what many of done. The center of gravity in the employer-employee relationship has shifted in many situations to favor the employee. 

I have long said that while no job is perfect, every job is a balance between the good things about it and the bad. Where the fulcrum lies is going to differ depending on an individual's priorities. For some, a big paycheck might outweigh abusive customers, for others quality of life balance or a flexible schedule might be more important. When the bad outweighs the good, that's when an employee is going to quit. That's entirely appropriate — an employee has to decide what's best for them; everyone has to weigh for themselves what they are willing to do and what they're willing to put up with. 

As a manager in several different industries for most of my life, I hired (and fired) a lot of people. One of the things that I had to deal with in that role was people who, for one reason or another, did not understand what the job was and expected the very nature of the job to conform to their expectations. For example, if you were hired to work on a road construction crew, it would not be reasonable to be upset that you had to work outside. The nature of the job is outside work. It would be reasonable to complain if you were not allowed rest or meal breaks, were not provided with personal protective equipment, or were not paid on time. But you can't work a road construction job inside an air conditioned office. 

One of my early management positions was as a district manager for a newspaper circulation department. Delivering newspapers is not an easy job. Newspaper carriers are considered independent contractors, not employees. (This may have changed in recent years, but it was the case when I was in the business) What this means is that they don't have days off, they can't call in sick and have to find their own substitute if they get sick or the car breaks down. They don't get snow days; they are out working in the dark in all kinds of weather and on all the holidays. This was all explained in detail to every single person that we contracted to deliver papers, yet we would still get carriers attempting to "call in sick", or who quit suddenly when the first snowstorm of the year hit. It may have been a terrible job, but it was the job that you agreed to do when you signed up. 

Much of my management career was spent in various roles in retail grocery stores. While not as grueling as a job delivering newspapers, if you worked in a grocery store you weren't an independent contractor, but an employee, with all of an employee's legal protections. There were many things that retail employees put up with that are not intrinsic to the job, but can be found in many retail environments. Varying schedules, and abusive customers are two top problems. The companies for whom I worked were obsessed with "making labor". A budget was set for payroll expenses for each store and each department within each store that was based on a percentage of gross sales. Dividing that dollar amount by the average wage told you how many hours you could schedule. Problems arose when sales were inconsistent — for example if the sales at the beginning of the month were regularly much higher than at the end of the month, or holiday sales were much higher than average. An employee might find herself scheduled for 40 hours one week, 28 hours another week and 15 on a slow week. This made it difficult to plan ahead, to budget, or even have a second job. 

The biggest disconnect between the needs of the company and the expectations of employees was holiday schedules. Like in my newspaper days, we made sure that we explained our expectations to new employees. One very important expectation was that during certain holidays we were much busier than normal and that we couldn't grant vacation time off during these holidays. That didn't mean that there were no days off. Everyone still got their two days off per week, but you couldn't expect to take off from December 20 through January 5 — those were extremely busy times and we needed all hands on deck. There was also the issue of fairness: everyone wanted July 4th off, wanted Christmas Eve off, but someone had to be there. But every year we still received requests for extended vacations. People were naturally disappointed when they couldn't have the time off that they wanted, but that was the job. 

It might be argued that some of these expectations, independent contractor status of newspaper carriers or no holidays off for retail workers shouldn't be part of the job. And that's where the free market comes in. Many industries, food service and retail in particular, are having trouble filling positions and have had to change the way that they do business. Some have responded with higher pay scales. But if the problem is working conditions and not pay, they will still have trouble filling positions. If enough people stay away from grocery store, or other retail, jobs due to expectations like working all holidays, eventually some of these companies might start closing on holidays. Or perhaps some other creative solution. Agreeing to certain job conditions, like working holidays, but then complaining or quitting when asked to work holidays, is dishonest. Ask questions, find out exactly what the job requirements are; if the employer deviates, stand your ground. If the job conditions don't meet your requirements, go somewhere else, which is more efficient and less stressful than taking a job where you know that you'll eventually quit because you'll be asked to do what they said you would be asked to do. 

Start at the beginning: Part I

Go to: Part XXV

An Agnostic's Look at The Bible - Part XXIII - Other Christianities

What most Christians don't realize is that despite what the Book of Acts might suggest the early Christian Church wasn't A Christian Church, but was a patchwork of numerous Christian Churches, or more descriptively, multiple Christianities. 

Consider the scenario. Evan assuming that the Gospels accurately describe the scope of Jesus' following, i.e. an inner circle of twelve (minus one) men, an outer circle of seventy and an unknown number of men and women of varying levels of commitment...if they truly believed what Jesus was preaching, they too believed that the world was coming to an end. Not at some nebulous time in the future, but before the people around them started dying off! If they were driven to continue Jesus' mission, they'd be attempting to get as many of their fellow Jews living right so that they could enter the Kingdom of God. (Yup. "Fellow Jews". You read that right, there is little indication that Jesus was preaching to the gentiles.) The last thing that any of Jesus' followers would be trying to do was to start an organization, a church. 

Nonetheless, that's what happened.

It's indisputable that something ostensibly based on the teachings of Jesus spread around the Roman Empire and even bordering nations within a very short period of time. How closely what got spread around adhered to what Jesus was teaching isn't so clear. 

There are several pieces of evidence that there were competing versions of Christianity in the first century following Jesus' death. Firstly there's the evidence within the scriptures that we have. Throughout the epistles there's repeated references to false prophets, false teachers, people preaching "another Jesus" and even those being labeled "antichrist". These weren't pagans, weren't satanists, they were other Christians who happened to have a different opinion about what Jesus taught and the meaning of those teachings, including what they were supposed to do about them. Then there's the testimony of Paul, who is very clear that he had doctrinal disagreements with other Christians, including Peter. We also have clear historical evidence of self-described Christian movements. The most well known and longest lasting were the Marcionites. Their founder, Marcion, taught that the God of the Old Testament and the God of Jesus were two separate entities, with the Old Testament God being an inferior, if not evil, entity. He also rejected all the Gospels except for Luke. His movement survived for several centuries as a rival to the Orthodox/Catholic Church. (The Catholics, or Roman Catholics, and the Eastern Orthodox were one church through the first millennium, even if there were internal disagreements) Even in the Gospels, there is a difference between the Jesus being presented in the synoptics versus the Gospel of John, and differences in emphasis among the synoptics. . 

It's not surprising that there was disagreement. It would be surprising if there were not. Jesus operated in a backwater of the Roman Empire. Even in the more urban areas communication was far from instantaneous. Christian communities, even in the same province would be virtually isolated, with only occasional communication with others. Jesus' teachings would have spread exclusively by word of mouth in the early decades before epistles and gospels came to be written and passed around. Not only would transmission of "the Word" resembled a modern game of "telephone", but as nature abhors a vacuum, so does human nature. Charismatic local leaders would have put their own spin on Jesus' words. 

One competing Christianity is the sect we know as the Ebionites. These were Christians who saw themselves as followers of Jesus who retained their Jewishness. In the writings that have come down to us they were opposed by Paul, who insisted that one did not need to follow Jewish law in order to be a Christian. Earlier I mentioned Marcion. There were also numerous sects of Christian Gnostics who held any number of beliefs that we today might consider bizarre. Or anti-Biblical. But who wrote the Bible?

One of things that every group of the various Christianities claimed was that their beliefs were passed down from Jesus' original apostles. By the time the competition among the various sects came to a head, all the originals were safely dead and could no longer be consulted. That didn't stop gospels and epistles from being produced with the names of The Twelve tacked on to them. In addition to the books of the New Testament that we know from our Bibles, there were dozens of gospels, epistles and apocalypses being passed around. There was no standard. Different sects used different writings. There was no central authority to decide which were legitimate and which weren't. 

But eventually there was a central authority. Even though the Catholic Church claims that there is an unbroken chain through Jesus to his apostles to their successors up through modern day. It's more likely in my opinion that what became the Catholic and Orthodox Churches coalesced slowly over several centuries until they became the dominant sect of the various Christianities. When Constantine the Great legalized Christianity in the Roman Empire there were still competing sects: the previously mentioned Marcionites and Gnostics, and the Arians in northern and western Europe. A sect called the Nestorians found refuge in the Persian Empire. The Catholic/Orthodox however, emerged as the dominant among the various types of Christianity. Their power, backed by the Empire, enabled them to claim to be the one, true, church, and label competitors as heretics. 

Not long after the consolidation of power, the Catholic/Orthodox hierarchy saw the need to establish which writings were authorized — what constituted the canon of scripture. Related to this was the doctrine of Apostolic Succession. The Catholic/Orthodox leadership maintained that they were the successors of the original apostles and that right doctrine had been transmitted from one generation to the next through that unbroken lineage. This succession was both literal — doctrine was passed down, and spiritual — they inherited the spiritual authority of their predecessors. Referring to this authority, they decided what writings were authentic and which were not, destroying many of the alternate scriptures, although some copies survived into modern times. 

The process was somewhat circular. The Bible, once established, was what the winning contestant in the Church competition supposedly was based upon, but what constituted that Bible, was what the winners decided would be in it. More on this in a future article: Sola Scriptura.

Start at The Beginning: Part I