So I work as an assistant manager in cell phone sales. I managed our store alone yesterday and my efforts yesterday took us from 4th place yesterday in our market of 25 stores to first place today. It’s the first time in months that we’ve been anywhere close to this so I was excited.
Get to work this morning, clock in, and the boss asks to talk to me. I never expect anyone to sing my praises but I definitely didn’t think I’d be ridiculed and have my boss start micromanaging me. I get into the office and he pulls up numbers, telling me we reported a low number of phone insurance sales yesterday. Insurance is a semi big deal so I’m thinking I say “gotcha, I’ll keep an eye on it. But hey, we’re in first!”
Nope. Boss berates me saying that our area manager berated him this morning because of the insurance number. He literally says the words to me, “why is it that the second I leave, the store takes a shit?” I’m flabbergasted. No idea what’s going on. Then he says he’s giving me an action plan. I have to email him at 10am, telling him what I did that day with the 30 minutes of my shift before the store opened. Also, if we don’t sell 4 new lines of service, 1 tv subscription, open 2 business accounts, open 2 first responder accounts, and get insurance on 60% of our sales for the day, I have to send him an email explaining why. Also, I have to know, at any given moment, what is going on in all of my employees transactions. To find out, I have to go up to them, access the same account they are in, find everything they did wrong or that I simply didn’t like the way they do it, and have a coaching discussion with them. Crazy shit.
Later, I’m on our management chat, and the team is joking around about a sales contest we’re running. Our area manager made a joke that she wasn’t going to count one of our sales because she didn’t believe that it really closed. I shit back with “sheesh, it ain’t safe out here for anyone!” She immediately called me and before I even got the word “hello” out, she hits me with “what did you mean by that?!” I said that I was just joking around and I thought that was what everyone is doing at the moment. She said I had been giving her attitude the past few days. First off, up until this moment, I LOVED this area manager, had considered her to be one of the best leaders I’ve had in the company. I had no intention of giving her attitude and cherished any advice she had for me. I didn’t know what to say.
I told my wife and she’s been fed up with them for a while, she saved some jobs for me to look at on indeed. When I got home and was able to go through them, I found I was too tired/irritated/whiplashed/disappointed/confused to even look at them. That’s when it hit me.
Pro tip for on how to keep your employees even though you mistreat them:
Create a work environment so hostile, stressful, and toxic that your employees are too exhausted to look for other jobs when they get home