Managers Part X - Minimizing Subordinate-Imposed Timne

As I alluded to at the end of Part IX, in theory there is no such thing as Subordinate-Imposed Time, but since practice often deviates from theory, in the real world there is such a thing as Subordinate-Imposed time. 

Subordinate-Imposed Time is time spent doing things that a subordinate asked you to do. Back to theory - in a typical organizational chart the people who give the orders are at the top and those who get ordered are lower down - there are invisible arrows always pointing down. But sometimes a crafty subordinate will figure a way to switch that arrow around so that it's pointing up. Usually this takes the form of a subordinate either not knowing how to do something (bad training perhaps?) or not wanting to take responsibility for the things listed in their job description. With the former, the manager has to get involved to either retrain the subordinate or to do the job herself; in the latter will also result in the manager having to do the work personally. In order to eliminate or minimize Subordinate-Imposed Time, the professional manager must internalize the reality that the job of a manager is not to do things, but to see that things get done. William Oncken, in his book Managing Management Time lays out five levels for a subordinate:

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. Back when I worked in a grocery store 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.

The independence scale can be looked at somewhat like an insurance policy. With #1 you have a pretty high premium (the time you have to spend in Subordinate-Imposed Time) but a low deductible (amount of exposure to risk - you're involved 100%, so there's no chance a subordinate's actions can get you in trouble). With #5 you have a low premium (very little time spent supervising the subordinate) but a very high deductible, or exposure to risk (it's still your ass on the line if the subordinate messes up). If you have an aversion to risk (i.e. trusting your subordinates) then you'll be stuck forever with subordinates who can't decide which hand to wipe their butts with without consulting you first; but if you can train and coach your people to rise to the higher numbers on the independence scale, then you will have all but eliminated a significant demand on your time. 

At my last job with a state government agency I saw both sides of management's application of these levels. During my first seven years I was a low-level analyst, but having been in management for so many years, I gravitated to getting myself to Level #5. This was discouraged. Any independent action had to be run by the manager. Even employees who had been in the agency for decades were afraid to make independent decisions. We were barely in Level #3. During my last few years I transferred to another division. The new manager laid out his vision to me in the first few weeks, then stepped back and let me do it. About the only time I got him involved in my work was if there was a situation that was clearly outside my job description. I was truly in a Level #5 situation. With the first manager she was dealing with quite a bit of subordinate-imposed time, since she had not allowed her team to progress beyond basic Level #3, whereas with my second manager he received virtually no subordinate-imposed time, at least not from me. 

There's another side to this. Unless you are at the top of the corporate pyramid, you have a boss. Maybe you have a boss who believes in the levels of independence and strives to eliminate her Subordinate-Imposed Time, freeing you to operate at Level Five, but more likely you have a manager who likes to micromanage to some extent. Then it becomes your job to manage your boss in order to get yourself higher on the independence scale. (More on this in Part XII)

Start with Part I

So, You Want to Join a Cult - Part IXa - The Ethics of Deprogramming

I'll argue that cults are generally bad things and people shouldn't get involved in them, but is it justified to forcibly remove cult members from the a cult?

Not usually. 

Of course, those cults that involve adult men with multiple teenage girls as their "wives", or if there is definite physical abuse going on, there should be intervention. But most cults are pretty boring. 

During my involvement with The Way International my parents considered "deprogramming" me in order to "free" me from my supposed mental imprisonment. They went so far as to consult with a deprogrammer, who actually talked them out of the attempt, pointing out that failure would mean that I'd likely never want to have anything to do with them ever again. They chose not to risk it. Mom and Dad never spoke of it, but many years later one of my sisters spilled the beans. At the time there was a lot of media focus on cults in the wake of the forced mass suicide at The People's Temple in Guyana. Parents whose children were in cults assumed that all cults were potentially going to end up like Jim Jones' followers. The cults that attracted the most attention also tended to have beliefs or practices (or both) that were far enough outside the mainstream as to appear "weird". The assumption was that the only reason that anyone would get involved in a cult was that they were brainwashed. Mind control was the only way to explain it. If you didn't think about it too deeply. 

Family members often point to how their loved ones "changed" after getting involved with a cult, not only their beliefs, but their behaviors and loyalties. But is that so unusual when new recruits to a cult are more likely to be young and actually looking to change their lives? Many people who have had family members join the military, especially those who have seen combat, could attest to the changes in the outlook of their loved ones. People change their political orientation all the time. A new cult member typically is looking for some meaning in their life and a cult often provides that meaning. Is it any wonder that they are often exceedingly gung-ho about their new life's focus? 

What about when the honeymoon period of cult involvement has ended and the cult member begins to experience some of the abusive treatment? Surely that's brainwashing? Not so fast! We can compare someone who stays in a harmful cult to someone who stays with an abusive spouse, sure that she loves the man who beats her every day, or is afraid that she won't be able to survive on her own. Or someone who hates their job but won't look for a new one. Justified or not, logical or not, people continue in harmful situations either because they fear that the alternative is worse, or have made the calculation that the perceived benefits outweighs the downside. I personally have done both - I stayed in a marriage that was mentally abusive because I was afraid that I'd lose my children and afraid to be perceived as a failure, rather than get out; I continued in a job that was terrible on many, many levels because I judged that the financial benefits outweighed the negatives that I had to endure. 

People join cults because they make a decision to get involved in something that they believe gives them what they want...whatever that may be. People stay involved in cults because they make a decision that staying in is the better alternative to getting out. Are they making the "right" decision? Who knows? Unless one knows all the variables in another's life, how can you decide what is best for that person? Spoiler alert: you can't. 

So what about deprogramming? You don't hear too much about deprogramming these days, or cults for that matter. But back in the eighties there were a lot of people making big money from the families of young people involved in cults. I know of several people who were the target of deprogrammers, some succumbed and left their cult, some escaped the deprogrammers and went back. What did deprogrammers actually do? Their first step was kidnapping the target of the deprogramming. Kidnapping! Often violently. The head deprogrammer would hire muscle to abduct the target who then be locked away from the world, often in an isolated farm house of hotel room. The abductee didn't usually even know what city they were in. They were allowed no contact with their fellow cult members, were not allowed to leave and sometimes were physically restrained. In one case that I know about personally, he had his shoes and socks taken away! In extreme cases they were sleep deprived and physically restrained. Various methods of persuasion were employed - the cult's beliefs were questioned or mocked, accusations made about the cult leader, and in one case that I am familiar with, the abductee's fiancée, who was also a cult member, was accused of cheating on him! The methods used by deprogrammers appear closer to what would be consider brainwashing than what the cults actually engaged in. 

If cults, in particular the one I was involved in, had brainwashed their members, it would stand to reason that it would be difficult for someone to leave. Yet during my own involvement I saw people freely walk away, new people, as well as those who had been in for decades. My own cousin, who got me involved, walked away within a year, presumably because she decided that it wasn't providing anything that she wanted or needed that she wasn't getting anywhere else.

Finally, in the United States we have the right of free association, as well as the right to the religion of our choice. No one has the right to forcibly convert (or de-convert) someone else...even if they think the other's beliefs are harmful...or weird.

Start from the Beginning: Part I

Review article on Brainwashing: Part IX - Brainwashing

So, You Want to Join a Cult - Part IX - Brainwashing

Recently, a family member referred to my time in The Way as "blindly following". Many anti-cult crusaders have referred to cult members as "brainwashed". 

"Brainwashing" is a term that gets brought up a lot when it comes to cults. Although there is room for disagreement about whether those of us in The Way, or any other cults for that matter, were brainwashed or not, let me define the term as I understand it. 

Brainwashing is not a scientific term, and actually has no widely accepted meaning. But the way I understand it, it would involve the forcible conversion of an individual from one set of beliefs to another set that they would not have changed to without physical, chemical or mental coercion. Brainwashing could involve torture, it could involve sensory or sleep deprivation, it could involve threats to family members. None of this, not even a hint of it, was present during my time in The Way. On the contrary, conversion to The Way's point of view was slow and methodical and involved eyes-wide-open decisions at every step. Which does not negate the abuse inflicted upon Way members, nor it's cultishness. 

One of the counter arguments against brainwashing in The Way is the ease with which people were able to leave The Way at all stages. The person who introduced me to The Way was my cousin, who ended her involvement several months after completing the PFAL class. Why did she leave when I didn't? I can't really say. In conversations with my parents after the fact she claimed that I was brainwashed, but could not account for her own resistance to the supposed mind control. Perhaps she wasn't as eager for answers as I was, perhaps she didn't have the need to stand out from the crowd as I did, maybe she was uncomfortable with speaking in tongues or just didn't like the people. The person who got her involved left New York as part of the WOW program shortly after my cousin and I got involved. The point is, nobody stopped her from leaving nor was she subject to any pressure to remain. Over the years I saw many people walk away for various reasons, and other remain for their own reasons. I'll be getting to the reasons why people stay later in this series. 

The Jonestown Massacre at The People's Temple in Guyana in November 1978 was a turning point. It was the point at which family members of people who were involved in alternative religious movements began regularly using the epithet "cult". It was the point where the assumption was, not just that someone's kids had converted, but that they were involved in something dangerous. It was the point where people were considering forcibly removing their loved ones. People calling themselves "deprogrammers" sprung up, promising, for a fee, to extract cult members and convert them back to their old beliefs. In general these deprogrammers used tactics that looked suspiciously like the brainwashing that they were ostensibly saving cultists from. I was aware of several Way members who stayed with The Way after deprogramming attempts. They described being abducted, restrained, isolated, and being subjected to sleep deprivation. 

My own parents, according to what a sibling told me years later, consulted with a deprogrammer. Fortunately this man was honest enough to tell them that if it didn't work, I would likely be estranged from them for the rest of my life and they abandoned the plan. To my parents' credit, they made an effort to understand and accept me from that point on. They visited me in Sidney Nebraska when I was a WOW there in 1980, and regularly came out to Nebraska after I was married, even attending a few Way meetings. Even though the perceived familial opposition had softened, now there was the cultural opposition, and in many ways, actual persecution that accompanied the anti-cult scare that followed the events in Guyana. 

So, if not brainwashing, what caused people to completely change their belief systems and loyalty, often leaving their own lives completely behind? I think what made my parents think I was "blinded" or "brainwashed" was their perception that I had somehow "changed". 

There's nothing like the enthusiasm of the newly converted. Whether it's religion or politics or the newly sober, it's the new recruit who is loud and in your face about it. And I definitely was in everyone's face about it. It started out during the three-week introductory class. I'd come home excited about some new thing I had learned and want to talk about it. To be clear, this wasn't some doctrine spun about billion year-old space aliens storing souls in a volcano, or Jesus appearing to the native Americans, this was stuff that you could trace directly to a Bible verse or two. Of course I was excited, this is what I had been searching for: answers! In response to the obvious discomfort that my parents had with what I was sharing, my mode became less excited and more arrogant that I had The Truth and they didn't. I suppose I had changed.

What my parents didn't know was that in addition to my search for spiritual truth, I was also kind of drifting. I had no real goals, was doing poorly in school (due mainly to lack of ambition) and was drinking a lot. I wasn't taking any hard drugs, but it's likely that I would have gone that path if not for The Way. Being involved in The Way gave me a sense of direction that came of being intimately involved in something greater than myself. I had a mission, I had purpose that I didn't have before. Making "moving the Word", i.e. proselytizing, my priority seemed weird to my family, and evidence of an unwelcome and unhealthy "change", but I don't want to see that alternate history where I didn't have that set of goals. 

After a year I moved into a series of "Way Homes" with other Way people, and a year later left the state as part of the missionary-like WOW program. I had planned on entering the Way's leadership program, The Way Corps, but was unable to put together the tuition. A lot of people, including my family thought that my wanting to cut ties and move to another state as a WOW was prima facie evidence that I was in a cult. The truth was that only a small percentage of Way members at any given time were part of any of their programs, and some never were involved beyond the twice-a-week "Twig" meetings. The heavy involvement was mostly people in their late teens or early twenties. People with children at home, or retirees, or men and women with professional careers tended to live "normal lives", indistinguishable from non-Way people. In my early days I saw few attempts at controlling the daily lives of Way members by the leadership, and there was no concerted effort to keep people from leaving.

Why does anyone stay in an uncomfortable, or even dangerous, situation? Why do people stay in crappy jobs or women with abusive husbands? I had decided, at least early in that ten-year period, that an accurate "true" teaching of the Bible was worth something. Right or wrong, I thought that The Way taught the Bible correctly, and I didn't know of any church which taught it any better. Certainly not the church of my youth, my return thereto being the subject of many family prayers. The abuses and attempts at control didn't come all at once, like the proverbial frog in the pot of boiling water, and it was a while before they came for me. For me, I was balancing the pros and the cons every day. For me the cons outweighed the pros. 

Rather than following along blindly, or being pitifully brainwashed, I made decisions every step of the way. Were some of these decisions based on false information? Absolutely. The Way's founder wasn't the great Biblical researcher that he made himself out to be. Were some of them based on wishful thinking. Also absolutely. Are "cult" members unique in making decisions that turn out to be bad, or get involved with and stay in bad situations? No. 

Don't assume that us ex-cultists are somehow different from the rest of you.

Start from the Beginning: Part I

Workin' Man - Part IX - Paper Pushin', Number Crunchin' Son of a Bitch

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

[There's a lot of math in this one. It's just for illustrative purposes. You can skip right over it and not lose any of the thread of the narrative] 

Looking at this period of my employment, it's clear that some kind of tutorial on how to handle money should have been part of the selection process when contracting distributors. Distributors, like carriers, were independent contractors. We didn't pay them for their time, they earned a profit on the difference between the cost of the papers and what customers paid them. Generally when contracting a new one, we got them a list of carriers and customers and left them to it. This just about guaranteed that the papers were delivered, but that's about it. 

In addition to the whole issue of cash flow that was covered in the previous installment, there was the fact that home delivered papers cost the distributor a different price than the "single copy" papers, i.e. those that were sold from vending machines. This became a problem once we had converted a distributorship to office billing. One particular distributor in Falls City was one of the few who understood the cash flow situation and had no problem making the transition to office billing. (i.e. he wasn't spending money that wasn't his) But this distributor, like many other who were now receiving a "profit check" every two weeks, viewed it as a "paycheck" and didn't understand when it varied according to the number of papers they ordered. In a typical distributorship the distributor received income from, not only the profit check, but from the cash in the form of quarters that they removed from the vending racks. There was a period of time when the number of subscriptions were dropping, but the number of papers sold in the vending machines was increasing. This caused the amount of the profit check to decrease, since in addition to the credit for what a customer paid for the paper, and the charge for the home delivery papers, there was also the charge for the papers going in to the racks. Of course this was balanced by an increased amount of money in cash, but it was hard to get them to understand. More math:

Let's say we have, like we did in Part VIII, 2000 papers in a city. 1500 of them are subscriptions and 500 are sold from racks. The subscriptions are billed at $1.00 each, and cost the customer $2.00 for $1.00/week in profit. The papers in the racks are billed at an average of $1.50/week, for a weekly profit of $1.25. In this example:

Net profit from subscriptions: $1,500

Charge for single copy: $750

Profit check: $750

Cash from racks: $1,375

Total profit: $2,125

But let's say the total numbers stay the same, but the ratio changes, say 1,250 subscriptions and 750 single copy

Net profit from subscriptions: $1,250

Charge for single copy: $1,125

Profit check: $125

Cash from racks: $2,062.50

Total profit: $2,187.50

The net profit has increased by $62.50, but since the check has decreased by the same amount, the illusion is that the distributor is making less money. My Falls City distributor was in a similar situation, and since he wasn't keeping track of the money he was collecting from racks, he thought he was making less money for the same amount of papers. It took a lot to convince him that he was actually ahead, but math is hard for some people. 

[The numbers I am quoting are for illustration purposes, I have no clear memory of what the World-Herald was charging for papers back then, or what the profit per paper was]

So I was dropped into this culture of lack of understanding of simple math, let alone the economics of profit/loss and cash flow. It was bad enough when I was auditing a distributor who had been contracted for a number of years, but in some cases there was a succession of distributors, one after the other, often starting out in the financial hole because the previous distributor had failed to transfer over future payments and the sales rep hadn't caught it. It was a mess of unbelievable proportions. It didn't help that some of the sales reps, ostensibly representing the company, sympathized with the distributors and undermined me as I showed up to do audits. One of the worst was in Grand Island.

Grand Island was divided into two distributorships, and both of them saw a parade of distributors presiding over the chaos. The district also included Hastings, also divided into two distributorships. One of my more memorable meetings was with a distributor who was delinquent in her payments. When showing up for audits I always dressed in a suit and tie to impress upon them the seriousness of my visit, even though the usual dress code was a bit looser, more like business casual. (I also dressed this way for court, a coworker once called them my "ass-kicking clothes") Whenever I arrived at an audit, usually for a distributor whom I had never met, I always introduced myself as "Tom Joyce, World-Herald Collections". Jackie, the sales rep for this area, who would end up quitting shortly after this audit, had apparently been coaching the distributor. My introduction was met with the response of "You're not nobody, you're just a paper pushin', number crunchin' son of a bitch". It didn't get any better from there on in.

The district that included Grand Island had been part of the western Nebraska Zone, number 7, but had been moved to Zone 5, the southeastern Nebraska region, where Michelle, my old manager was still in charge. This district was such a mess, that after Jackie quit, management decided that I would be sent in to clean it up before they would hire a new sales rep. I had done this for another district not long before and they apparently thought that I was the guy to fix all the issues. Of the Grand Island and Hastings distributorships, three of the four were open, i.e. substitutes were delivering the papers to the carriers while I paid the carriers, collected from the vending machines and tried to get things in order before we hired new distributors. Before I took over the distributorships had been converted to office billing, but I had not been involved in the conversion. In theory all the advanced payments had been transferred to the corporate office, but we found out much later that only around 75% of the customers were actually being billed, and of that 75% around a third were in arrears. This problem was hidden for quite a while. The cash that had been transferred from the previous distributor to the company run "office distributorship" was large enough that the bi-weekly statement showed a credit balance for over a month, maybe two. Since that cash transfer only represented a portion of the customers who were receiving papers, and since the statement billed the office account for the full amount of papers delivered, pretty soon the office account, which I was responsible for, started showing a balance due. Each week I collected quarters from the racks and deposited the funds, but it wasn't enough to balance out the fact that half the customers weren't paying for the papers. 

When I realized what was happening I tried to fix the problem. Many of the carriers couldn't produce route lists with names and addresses of customers. I suggested dropping the number of papers to match customers that we could verify and rebilling anyone who called to complain, but this idea was rejected. We had carriers hand deliver bills to all customers who we didn't have on our lists, and received only a trickle of payments. One of the things that I suspected was that the recently quit sales rep had artificially inflated sales number in order to earn a bonus. I'd seen this before. Before the days of office billing it was hard to verify whether a new customer was real or not. It was pretty clear by this juncture that a large percentage of papers were being delivered to people who didn't want them, or at least didn't want to pay for them. Again I explained to Michelle, the manager in charge of the Region, (Zones had been renamed Regions) the situation. She explained it to upper management, but we were still prevented from decreasing the number of papers.

The price paid by a subscriber for a paper doesn't come close to paying for the cost of producing that paper. Advertising is what paid the bills. But high circulation numbers served to justify higher advertising costs. The Audit Bureau of Circulation was an outside entity that confirmed circulation numbers so that the advertising sales reps wouldn't be tempted to inflate them. But if papers were being delivered and there was no evidence that they weren't being paid for, they counted toward your circulation numbers. Patrick D, the State Circulation Manager at the time, simply was unwilling to take a huge hit to the sales figures.

During all of this I was shielded somewhat from what was being discussed among the big dogs of Circulation. I informed Michelle of the problems, and I assumed that she was educating Patrick D about why it wasn't going to get better. I don't know if she was doing a poor job of communicating or Patrick just didn't want to hear it, but we both were summoned to Omaha for a meeting one afternoon. In the course of the conversation it became clear that Patrick thought that Michelle and I were mismanaging the district, or even possibly stealing money. He was adamant that the "missing" money was due to some malfeasance on the part of one or both of us. I tried to explain it was only missing on paper - that the balance due was there, and would only get larger because we were delivering more papers than we were getting paid for. He was not interested in anything I had to say, and made it clear that both mine and Michelle's jobs were on the line. I couldn't believe it, I couldn't believe that he would think that we would steal from the company and I couldn't believe that he couldn't understand simple math.

Here's where I shot myself in the foot. Not long before I had been out collecting quarters from the vending racks. I had around $300 in a bank bag - I don't recall why I put the bag on top of my car, but I did - and drove off, losing it.  Already Patrick had been making noises about the shortfall in the distributorship, and I was afraid to admit that I lost $300, so I didn't say anything, figuring that with all the other losses, it would go unnoticed. And it did, up to that point. (By this time the  shortfall on paper was several thousand dollars) Scared that Patrick would somehow find out about the lost bank bag, I took $300 of my own money, bought a money order and deposited it, claiming that I had "found" a money order that I misplaced and forgot to deposit. I didn't think Patrick would believe the true story. Well, he didn't believe the fake story either, and saw it as evidence that I was up to something shady. I was called into his office and confronted with the fact that the date on the money order was a few days old, refuting my story. I chose not to try and defend myself. Amazingly, I was not fired, but I was demoted back to my old job, which had just come back open - southeast Nebraska, District 55.

Start with Part I

Workin' Man - Part VII - Da Boss

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

Getting promoted to Night Manager, a full time, salaried position, enabled me to work just one job. I was able to give up my job at the Omaha World-Herald, leaving an unburnt bridge behind me (which would come in handy later on) At the time, Food 4 Less operated three stores in Lincoln: N 48th & O Sts, S 48th St & Pioneers Blvd and one on Havelock Ave (now a Russ's Market). Shortly before this promotion the owners decided that my store would stay open 24 hours a day. My shift would be 9:00pm - 7:00am, even if we finished stocking the truck earlier; now I had regular hours and a regular paycheck. 

Newly promoted from the ranks, I still thought like a stocker, even though I was responsible not only for getting displays built and the shelves stocked, but since we were open now, for customer service as well. Learning to think like someone who was in charge of the whole store was a mindset that would take time. Scheduling was my biggest headache. We had recently started receiving deliveries from two different warehouses, one which delivered on three days and the other on two different days. The warehouse that delivered on two days brought their load in the late morning, so I needed at least one person to come in and unload those trucks that would be stocked that night - fortunately we had such a large back room that leaving all those pallets in the back was no issue. The nights with no deliveries needed a small crew as well, to run back stock and to face the aisles. I now also had to schedule a cashier every night as well. 

One of the things that I was learning about being a manager, even though it would be many years before I was able to articulate it, is that it's not a manager's job to do things, but to get things done. In other words, you can accomplish more as a manager by leveraging your staff's abilities and getting the most out of them by training them to be effective at their jobs, than you can by simply adding your own labor to the mix. Many managers believe that a "good" manager is one who works alongside the crew, demonstrating that they're one of them. While there are morale-boosting benefits to doing this, it's only part of the job. For example if I'm "working hard" stocking the soup aisle, I have no idea what's going on in the rest of the store. Is the new stocker properly trained? Are there lines up front which require opening up a second cash register? Is there shoplifting going on? Is there broken glass on the floor in the baby food aisle that needs to be swept up? All these things can get missed if the person in charge is concentrating on a small part of the job. 

The store was situated on O Street, the main East-West arterial in Lincoln. Part of the parking lot was oriented so that you could sit in your car and watch the traffic go by, and keep an eye out for your friends as the drove by. We frequently had to go out into the lot and ask people to leave. For these discussions I often took two of my biggest and scariest looking stockers with me in order to emphasize the point! Although the part of town wasn't known as being especially rough, we still used to get trouble makers. Usually getting the entire stock crew lined up behind me dissuaded anyone from causing trouble. There was one night where things escalated before I could get backup and I was beaten up and had to go to the emergency room to get checked out. Around then I started taking Tae Kwon Do lessons after work with Von, one of my stockers. 

At some point I received a promotion to the position of "third man" and worked some shifts during the day. I still ran the stock crew two nights a week, but worked first and second shifts the other three work days. In those days there were fewer departments and therefore fewer managers. There was a store manager, assistant store manager and meat and produce department managers. There was no bakery, deli or floral department. Cashiers were overseen and scheduled by the store manager. There was no customer service counter or back office. The manager in charge of each shift counted out drawers and tallied up the cash and checks at the end of the shift (hardly anyone paid with credit cards). The  "third man" was kind of a fill-in, "gopher", position, responsible for ordering and filling the milk, keeping displays filled and covering for other managers on their days off, as well as working the second shift on occasion. Every Wednesday I substituted for Leonard, the Produce Manager. (it was during one of these Wednesdays that I discovered KZUM radio. I was working in the back room trimming lettuce and stumbled across Eli Rhoades' Jazz Fusion show). 

About halfway through my four-year stint at Food 4 Less I was given a raise and transferred to the store at 48th and Pioneers. The Night Manager at that store was apparently doing a bad job, so I became the Night Manager. That store had not yet switched over to being open 24 hours, so I assumed that I'd be working a similar shift to the one when I first became Night Manager at 48th & O. I assumed incorrectly. I was expected to cover not only the overnight stocking shift, but the second shift, starting at 4:00PM! Of course this schedule motivated me to get the truck stocked as quickly as possible, since any hours past midnight were essentially working for free. At first this was difficult to achieve. I inherited an unnecessarily large crew, many who had restrictions that made scheduling difficult. Two high school kids who couldn't work past midnight and would just leave at 12:00 with their aisles half done; a professional bowler who was only available on Tuesdays when he wasn't bowling; other people who had been promised no weekend shifts; friends of the owner's son...it went on and on. Most of the crew were lazy and slow. My solution was to be a hard-ass.

By "being a hard-ass" I mean strict enforcement of the rules. I got rid of the slackers by writing up and firing people for no-call/no-shows, lateness, insubordination, and anything else I could think of to cull the herd. Little by little the ones who didn't want to do the job either were fired or quit and I was left with a core of people who wanted to be there and were great stockers. Around this time the store was switched to being open 24 hours and I started coming in at 9:00PM instead of 4:00PM; the pressure to get done by midnight went away. One of my top people was Lonnie, who was literally a rocket scientist with several advanced degrees. He was fast and accurate - I could depend on him to get a lot done each night. Lee was a student from New Hampshire who had worked for me at my previous store. Lee's nickname was "Complete Bastard", after one of the characters on MYV's The Young Ones. There was Rudy, who at least once a night would run down an aisle and slide on his belly the rest of the way when he was done stocking an aisle. On paper we didn't have enough people to get the job done, but every one of them was head and shoulders above the average stocker. 

Then, as now, holidays were extra busy. One Thanksgiving Eve, when I was still starting at 4:00PM the lines stretched from the check stands to the back of the store. I'll never forget Ron, the Assistant Store Manager at the time, waving goodbye as he walked out in the midst of the chaos, leaving me to handle it. I swore that if I was ever in that position I'd never do that to anyone. 

A situation that I didn't have to deal with at my other store was the friends of the son of the company owner. Jeff was about my age (I was under 30 at the time) and was a partier, as were his friends. On several occasions they would come in late at night and ask me to cash checks for them. Of course, if Jeff was there I'd have to do it, but his buddies would act like the store was their personal bank. I always refused and would predictably get showered with abuse. After I complained to the owner, it stopped. 

Just because I had a great crew doesn't mean that we didn't occasionally get bad ones. We hired a guy named Tom who turned out to be one of the worst stockers I ever managed. After a few weeks Lonnie decided that he couldn't bear calling this guy the same name as me, so he renamed him "Erl". ("a" left out on purpose) Where he came up with that name I'll never know, but it stuck. One of the things we did when running backstock was to put excess stock on the top of the warehouse shelving. Usually one stocker would stand up top while another would toss cases up to him. Erl frequently would toss boxes straight up only to have them fall back down and hit him in the face. Erl didn't last long. Another substandard stocker, Steve, decided that all of his problems were due to discrimination. I had to talk to him a number of times about working faster and he was catching flack from his coworkers who had to pick up the slack. One day he just didn't show up and we never saw him again. The next thing I knew we were being investigated by the Lincoln Human Rights Commission. Steve was a Native American. It may be hard to believe, but I had no idea that he was Native. Growing up I encountered a lot of different ethnic groups, but rarely Native Americans. So the idea that I was discriminating against him because he was Native American struck me as ridiculous. After the investigation started he stopped in one night to harangue me, calling me a "White Bastard". My crew started calling me "W.B." after that. We ended up being cleared of any wrongdoing. I'll never forget the answer that Lonnie gave the investigator when asked if I had ever demonstrated any prejudice in my dealing: "Nope, Tom just dislikes assholes". 

One notable adventure involved mice. One night while taking a break at the front of the store we noticed a parade of mice marching along the back aisle! Now most people don't realize that any business that sells food is going to have some rodents, but this was an invasion! The store manager started paying a bounty to anyone who could catch a mouse. A few of the stockers made quite a few bucks. 

Even though this wasn't what you'd call a rough neighborhood, we still had people coming in and causing trouble, usually teenagers. I never called the police on them, but chased them out and occasionally "escorted" them out physically. One such teenage boy returned with his father, who turned out to be a police officer. The father threatened and attempted to intimidate me, until one of the meat cutters, a huge man, walked out of the cutting room holding a large knife. That was the end of that.

As I mentioned in previous installments I had a violent streak in my younger days. One afternoon a belligerent customer shoved me during an argument. I grabbed him by the front of the shirt and threw him out (no punching involved). I didn't hear anything the next day, or the day after that, and assumed that nothing would come of it. It was an inventory weekend and on Monday morning I finished up the counting and filled in on a checkstand for an hour, something I normally did since the morning checker didn't come in until 7:00. When I went upstairs to collect my jacket I was fired. When I asked why he waited all weekend to fire me, Lyle, the store manager, told me that he didn't have anyone else to run inventory and he needed me to check in the morning!

Since I hadn't burned any bridges after leaving the Omaha World-Herald I went straight to their office and asked for a job. Shannon, the office manager hired me on the spot for a part-time job. I then called Bud Trotter, who ran the floor cleaning service that cleaned and waxed Food 4 Less' floors. He also hired me on the spot. I was back to working two part-time jobs, but due to keeping good relations with a previous job, I was able to start work right away, with no intervening unemployment.

Start with Part I

Go to: Part VIII

Workin' Man - Part VIII - What? Am I Delivering Papers Again?

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

Fired! Since I hadn't burned any bridges after leaving the Omaha World-Herald, I went straight to their office and asked for a job. Shannon, the office manager, hired me on the spot for a part-time job. I then called Bud Trotter, who ran the floor cleaning service that cleaned and waxed Food 4 Less' floors. He also hired me on the spot. I was back to working two part-time jobs, but due to keeping good relations with a previous job, I was able to start work right away, with no intervening unemployment.

The newspaper job was much as it had been a few years before. At the floor cleaning company I travelled around the city cleaning bathrooms and floors of the many businesses that Trotter had contracts with. Most of the guys I worked with were former convicts. One was the nephew of Charlie Starkweather. I think my boss was afraid of them. At one point he gave me a raise and told me that I was the crew supervisor, but asked me not to tell anyone that I was, since it would upset them. We cleaned a variety of places: a school room, a gym, a car dealership, a venue that could be rented out for weddings and other parties, and my old store that I had been fired from. After a few months I applied for a full-time salaried position at The Omaha World-Herald, Sales Representative for several counties in southeast Nebraska. 

The Omaha World-Herald's staff was divided into several divisions: Editorial, which included reporters and editors; Production, the people who put together the physical paper; Advertising, salesmen who sold ads in the paper - which paid most of the bills; Administrative - Personnel, Payroll and Accounting; and finally Circulation, the people who brought the newspaper to your door, the paper carriers, bundle haulers, truck drivers and the like. I was part of Circulation. 

Circulation was divided into two main divisions, Metro and State. Metro covered the city of Omaha and it's suburbs, including Bellevue. State was divided into four Zones. Zone 4 was eastern Nebraska north of the Platte River as far west as Valentine; Zone 5 was eastern Nebraska south of the Platte River as far west as York; Zone 7 was the rest of Nebraska; Zone 6 was Western Iowa. (No Zones 1-3? I have no idea why not) Each Zone also included border counties in adjacent states. Each Zone was overseen by a Zone Manager and was subdivided into districts run by a Sales Representative who coordinated paper carriers and "single copy" (store sales and vending machines, aka "racks"). Some areas, usually the small towns, received service every day, often by teenage paper carriers. The larger towns were coordinated by a distributor who handled many of the same duties as a sales rep within their town. Rural areas received home delivery only on Sunday, delivered by a "motor route carrier", with Monday through Saturday papers sent by mail. Papers were delivered to the carriers by way of a complex web of drivers that were contracted by the Transportation Department, and who were not overseen by the sales rep. 

When I first started as a sales rep I was responsible for Lancaster, Otoe, Nemaha and Johnson Counties; not long afterward Lancaster was absorbed into the office that ran the city of Lincoln, and Pawnee and Richardson Counties were added to my district. As a sales rep I didn't have an office, but worked out of my home and my car. Day to day, it wasn't a very difficult job, the carriers mostly worked without any supervision. Most customers paid their carriers directly. Carriers would order the total number of papers that they needed and were billed for them by the World-Herald. What was left over was the carrier's profit. 

Sales Reps were pretty much on their own with minimal supervision by the Zone Manager. The only things that your manager or the State Circulation Manager monitored was collections and sales. We would get a report every other week listing the status of each carrier's bill. If they were in arrears we were expected to send out a letter reminding them that their bill was overdue. If nonpayment went on for too long we were expected to visit the carrier and collect in person. This was hardly ever a problem. I had one restaurant owner in Brownville who had a rack out front. He liked to pay once a month and once threatened to thrown the rack in the Missouri River if I sent him another letter! The other thing that was monitored was sales. This was back in the pre-internet days when people were actually reading physical newspapers. We were expected to at least maintain our circulation numbers, but ideally increase them year over year. We would receive bonuses for increases of 1%, 2% or maintaining previous year's numbers. Every few months corporate would sponsor sales contests where carriers would receive cash or prizes for getting new customers. On occasion all the sales reps in a Zone would converge on a town and escort carriers door-to-door to solicit news sales. We could also contract telemarketers to increase sales as well. 

If things were running smoothly, you hardly had anything to do, and your work weeks were quite a bit less than 40 hours. On the flip side, if carriers quit and you had to deliver routes yourself as well as hunt for a replacement, you might be working in excess of 60 hour weeks. One thing that I have always been good at was organization and time management, so I made sure that all my carriers were trained to handle problems themselves, including minor issues like a vending rack that didn't work or a shortage of papers. 

I don't know if this was normal for businesses during this time period, but even though there was a "personnel" department, it wasn't like the Human Resources Departments that you see today. Personnel basically just made sure all the paperwork was filled out. There wasn't any annual performance reviews either. Pay increases were totally at the discretion of your manager. When I was first hired, my manager liked me, so I received decent increases. When she accepted a promotion as a Training Manager I applied for the open Zone Manager position. Not only did I not get the promotion, but I found out about it when I ran into another sales rep at the airport - management had no intention of informing me. Dave, the recipient of the promotion, had started around the same time as I did. As with the lack of any kind of HR involvement in the review process, the manager had complete discretion regarding who was promoted. In this case both Dave and Jim, the State Circulation Manager, had similar backgrounds as high school football players and later, coaches. People tend to believe that people who are just like them are the most qualified. They obviously believe that they themselves are qualified, so people like them must also be the best candidates for promotion. Getting passed over for promotion might have gone over more easily if I had actually been interviewed for the position, but I made the best of it. The problem was that Dave was a terrible manager.

I don't know if  Dave had been the kind of coach who yelled at his players, or if it was just his personality, but he was rude and abusive. He made unreasonable demands and was a master of gaslighting well before I knew what gaslighting was. He was quite a contrast with Mary, our previous manager. By all accounts the sales reps in our zone were all doing our jobs competently, and Mary just got a promotion, so her methods must have been acceptable, but like a lot of newly promoted managers, Dave acted like things needed to be fixed. He had the "new sheriff in town" attitude. It got bad enough that several of us went over his head to complain to Jim, his immediate supervisor. Rather than taking us seriously, all of us were branded as complainers. The good news was that before long Dave was transferred to a different zone. Michelle, the new manager was much easier to work with, but we all had targets on our backs. 

As the new year began I approached Michelle, our new manager, about a pay increase, which up until that time had been awarded automatically every January. I was told that raises were given for performance, not seniority. Without a performance review, it was complete surprise that there was a problem with me performance. Obviously the result of speaking up about a bad manager had resulted in me being tarred as a "bad" employee. I was able to negotiate a re-evaluation of my performance in three months. During that time I did absolutely nothing different, but received a raise anyway. This was to be a pattern for my thirteen years with The Omaha World-Herald: alternating between being a star performer and getting in big trouble (sometimes my own fault, sometimes a victim of circumstance)

After I had been a sales rep for a few years, the State Circulation Manager created a new position - Special Projects Coordinator. It was an ill-defined position that boiled down to executing any bright idea the State Manager came up with. The first idea was to turn Sunday-only delivery areas into seven-day delivery areas. Most rural areas only received home delivery on Sunday, with Monday - Saturday papers arriving in the mail. The reason that this was the case was that it cost too much to pay someone to deliver papers over routes that were sometimes over 100 miles long and took hours to deliver...every day. Carriers made their money on the difference between what they were charged for the papers and what the customers paid them. On a small in-town route there wasn't much expense involved in delivering papers, but on these large motor routes where there were often miles between customers, the World-Herald added on what was called a "rate adjustment" to make the route financially viable for the carrier. Turning these Sunday Only routes into Seven Day routes would have meant a huge increase in  the rate adjustment. Without getting too deep into the math, the profit on a Sunday paper was quite a bit higher than for a daily paper, so the rate adjustment would have to be increased by a factor of 10 or 15 at least, not merely six. This was clearly financially unsupportable. Add this to the reality that most, if not all, the Sunday motor carriers worked a regular job during the week and would be unavailable Monday - Saturday. This would mean replacing them with someone willing to deliver newspapers every day. If they could be found. After working on this for a couple of months we were able to do this on only one route, and the initiative was abandoned. 

My next assignment as Special Projects Coordinator was to fill in as Acting Collections Manager after the previous manager retired. The OWH was in the process of converting customers from paying the carriers to them being billed centrally from the corporate office. This would mean that instead of paying a bill every two weeks, carriers would receive a biweekly check for their profits. (They would still be collecting cash from their vending machines and any stores they delivered to). This meant that I would have to audit carriers and distributors to get a list of all their customers, as well as how far they had paid in advance. We would then enter the customers' information in the Circulation database. If they had paid in advance, as most did, the distributor would turn that money over to the corporate office. Future billings and payments would be handled centrally. The problem was that most distributors were spending the money instead of setting it aside to cover future bills.  Let me illustrate with some math:

A city of 24,000 might have around 7,000 households, and possibly 2,000 subscriptions. Back then a seven-day subscription was $2.00. So, at the beginning of a 13-week billing period the distributor would have collected $52,000. I don't recall what we charged the distributor per subscription, but let's say that it was $1.00. That means that every week the distributor owed the World-Herald $2,000. Let's say the carriers  made 50¢ per subscription, that another $1,000 a week. So at the end of 13 weeks the distributor will have paid out $39,000 and have a profit of $13,000, $1,000 a week. 

A smart distributor would put that $52K in the bank where it would earn interest and draw from the account to pay the World-Herald and his carriers. But what was happening was that the $52,000 in the bank was very tempting. Time and time again distributors were using that $52,000 (only $13,000 of which was ultimately his if they were still in the job through the entire 13 weeks) and spending it. I was aware of a couple of people who bought vehicles with that money. They would then scramble around to pay their bills and their carriers. They were constantly in cash flow crisis mode. But it really became a problem when a distributor quit mid-billing period. Let's illustrate with more math:

A distributor quits after week eight of the billing period. Theoretically he should have $20,000 in the bank which represented 2,000 customers who had paid their $2.00/week in advance. This money should have been turned over to the new distributor because it wasn't his! Time after time distributors quit without turning over the advance payments, leaving the new distributors immediately in the hole. A similar issue occurred when we were converting a distributorship over to office billing. An audit would determine how much advance payments a distributor was holding, and they would be billed for that money. If they were properly managing their cash flow there was no problem. The customers would be billed when their subscription expired and the distributor would receive a check for their profit every week. In many cases, they weren't properly managing their cash flow and would abruptly quit when they were billed for thousands of dollars that they had already spent. 

My job for about a year was to go around auditing distributors and carriers on large routes in order to facilitate the conversion to central office billing. As part of this process I was tasked with taking those who owed us money to court. Sometimes it was small claims, sometimes it was district court. The World-Herald did not send a lawyer in with me, although their legal department helped draft papers. 

This was at the same time the most interesting and the most frustrating part of my time with the paper. 

Start with Part I

Go to: Part IX

Managers Part IX - What Does a Manager Do?

So what does a manager do? To most people, a manager is just a higher-paid, busier version of the people he or she manages, who also bosses people around. Just what is a manager supposed to manage? According to Bill Oncken Jr., whose book Managing Management Time is one of the most detailed, practical management guide that I have ever seen, a manager is someone who, in contrast to someone who does things, is someone gets things done.  How does a manager get things done? Allowing for the fact that some people with the title "manager" don't supervise anyone, but oversee processes, managers get things done by way of other people. How the professional manager utilizes others to get things done consists largely in how his or her time is spent.

There are broadly three categories of time: boss-imposed, system-imposed, and self-imposed. As we progress, you'll see that time can also be divided in other ways, some that overlap with the three categories listed here. Boss-imposed time is pretty easy to explain. It's the time you spend doing things that your immediate supervisor tells you to do. System-imposed time is time that you spend dealing with the administrative tasks: paperwork, tracking, answering emails. The amount of system-imposed time varies from industry to industry and flourishes when there active factions within a company all vying for control and influence. Self-imposed time is a little harder to pin down. It's not playing hooky from work and going fishing or playing golf, it's not deciding to spend your work day with your feet up on the desk. What it is, is time that you spend conducting your business as you see fit, free from the constraints of the system or the orders of your boss. It's the time you spend planning, the time you spend coaching your subordinates and anticipating and solving problems that haven't occurred yet. In a perfect world, your boss- and system-imposed time will be minimized and your self-imposed time will be maximized. But how do you do that? We'll look at the boss and the system in a later post, but first let's look at a group of people who aren't really part of the three categories of time: subordinates.

In theory, there is no such thing as subordinate-imposed time. In any organizational chart that you're likely to see the big boss is on top, medium and little bosses are under him, front line supervisors are father down and the workers are on the bottom. There is no organizational chart in the world where the subordinates in theory, can tell the boss what to do, or make demands on his time. The fertilizer flows downhill! So, if you are allowing your subordinates to determine how your time is to be spent, then you are exercising some self-imposed time by willingly upending that org chart. (This is not to say that lower-level managers and workers are without worth, later on we'll talk about how to manage your manager). You are letting yourself be managed, reversing the roles and eating up your self-imposed time.

More detail on this in a later article, but the key to eliminating subordinate-imposed time is to delegate. Let me point out that delegating and assigning are two different things. Assigning is when I give you a task, perhaps even tell you how and when to do it. Delegating is when I give you responsibility and authority for a certain aspect of your job and hold you accountable for getting it done. Certainly training and coaching is involved, but someone to whom responsibility is delegated does not wait to be told what to do, or how or when to do it. Someone who receives assignments, goes from one duty to the next, and is at a loss when the list of jobs runs out. Time for a break! (or to go ask the boss what to do).

At one time in my life I managed a retail store. When I left for the day, I entrusted the operation of the store to an "evening supervisor". Once I had fully trained this person and clearly communicated my expectations, I allowed him to manage his time as he saw fit, as long as the standards that I had set had been met. My immediate supervisor however, insisted that I provide my evening supervisor with a list of things to do every night. Not only that, but I had to let him inspect this list at any time to prove that I had created it, complete with check-marks indicating that my supervisor had completed the list. And I couldn't just hand out a generic list every night - no - it had to be a brand-new, fresh list every night. My boss-imposed time increased and forced me to burden my subordinate with some boss-imposed time as well. Even worse, I was assigning tasks to someone whom I should have been delegating responsibility to and communicating a lack of trust and confidence in his abilities. In addition, my supervisor, by assigning me the task of creating this to-do list, was communicating a lack of trust and confidence in my ability to successfully delegate. 

Nobody won.

But there is a way to minimize, or even eliminate, subordinate-imposed time...

Start with Part I

Go to: Part X