In my first blog entry, I discussed security aspects of my first job. For this blog entry, I will be revisiting that job, but for another reason. When I was first hired, I was 16 years old. The manager that hired me for the position was a wonderful boss. Although she let everyone know that she was the woman in charge, she would still ask for input on how to better run our store and would implement changes as a team. She was a spitfire 65-year-old woman who loved her job and loved her employees. She would go above and beyond for all her employees in both their professional and personal lives. We all considered her our “surrogate grandmother”, and we worked very hard for her. Our store had received awards for customer service, speed of service and cleanliness every year that I worked underneath her. The main branch that we all worked under put our store as the store that all others should strive to be. We were the spotlight store on center stage. After 9 years of working for her, everything changed in an instant.
One day, I received a call from my store. When I picked up the phone, I was told that our manager had suddenly passed away. This was a devastating blow to all of us. Corporate had workers from other stores come and relieve us of our positions so that we could attend her funeral. After grieving the loss of our fearless leader, we wondered what that meant for us. She was the backbone of our store, so we were hoping that the next manager to come through would follow in her footsteps so that we could maintain our status and make her proud. Unfortunately, that was not at all what had happened.
The new manager that they sent to our store, I will call her “Trista”, was new to her management position (she had been working for the company for three years at that point). She held a meeting so that we could all meet her, and during that meeting, we quickly learned that her managing style was completely different from what we previously had. Trista let us know that she was the boss and any input from other employees who were not part of her management staff was not going to be considered or taken seriously. She was more of a tyrant than a boss, but we decided to give her a chance to see what we could do as a team. Being that I was one of four veteran employees and the most senior employee on my shift, I was looked to for guidance by novice employees. Because I was looked up to by the employees, Trista put a target on my back. From the moment that she realized that she could not intimidate me or force me to make decisions that were bad for the other employees, she treated me terribly. Instead of using me as a tool to bridge the gap between herself and the employees, she saw me as a threat to her managerial power. At one point, she even tried to set me up to admit to theft (which did not work because I was not stealing anything). That is only one instance of the many, many times she had tried to get me fired. Work life became unbearable for so many of us, and the turnover rate began to increase significantly.
Trista was the posterchild for the quote “power tends to corrupt” (Cislak et al., 2018). Studies have shown that power can negatively influence the ability to have meaningful relationships, decrease inclination to take other’s input, and can reduce empathy for others (Cislak et al., 2018). Because Trista was more concerned with having control over others and not personal control, the store began to fall apart (Cislak et al.,2018). If she were to utilize personal control, then both she and the store could have benefitted from the relationship (Cislak et al, 2018). Trista believed that she was powerful because of who she was as a person and not because the position that she was given gave her the illusion of power, therefore exercising the fundamental attribution error (Cislak et al., 2018). In the time that I had worked with her, she exhibited many signs of abuse of power. She was narcissistic, overoptimistic in her abilities, and harmful to the morale of employees. Because of her behavior, her supervisor staff (those under her, but above my position) began speaking to me about how we can stop her. When I brought her behavior to the attention of those above her, I was told that I was the problem and that I basically needed to shut my mouth and deal with her abuse. They were more concerned with protecting the system of power than helping abused employees. This led to me being treated badly by her boss as well. The store began to fail health inspections, receive bad reviews online, and customers began to stop coming to the store.
Eventually, I was able to transfer to a different store with the help of another store manager who was aware of my situation. After I had left and the buffer between Trista and the employees was gone, the employees revolted against her. Every single employee called into the employee hotline number multiple times a week. This caused the issues to gradually go further up the corporate ladder until someone from Human Resources paid the store a visit and personally interviewed employees, myself included (even though I was no longer there). In the end, Trista was relieved of her position within the company and was told that she should seek employment elsewhere. There are still one or two employees at the store with whom I had previously worked with. They still talk about me and what I had done for them by calling me their “founding father”. It is important that, if someone is corrupt with power, they are called out for their behavior and the situation is remedied. If anyone had listened to us in the first place, the decline of the store, loss of employees, and the loss of her position could have been easily avoided.
The last time I heard of Trista, she was being interviewed at a pet store by a former employee of hers. She did not get the job.
References
Cislak, A., Cichocka, A., Wojcik, A. D., & Frankowska, N. (2018). Power Corrupts, but Control Does Not: What Stands Behind the Effects of Holding High Positions. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 44(6), 944–957. https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167218757456
It is always a positive point to have such a caring and interested boss who values the time and work experience as such boss you describe. For a boss to impact an employee and drastically change their lives is what most employees want when entering a workplace. As you begin to talk about the future boss who took place of the one who passed away, this became more of a dictator rather than one who led. You input a couple great references and upheld your main point of abuse of power from certain leaders and how that can impact an employee. The end resolution of your situation seemed to have been agreed upon by corporate as they relieved that employee of her position and questioned all employees involved. This part shows the care invested by the corporate company headquarters and the impact they hold a manager to have on said employees such as yourself. Your last statement is very true and if someone does have skewed actions in a management position, they should be held accountable and called out professionally within HR. “According to Mental Health America’s examination of over 17,000 employees across 19 industries, 64% of employees don’t feel their boss provides them adequate support, and another survey found that 44% of employees have left a job because of a bad boss” (Ron, 2018).
References: Carucci, Ron, (2018). How to deal with a Passive-Aggressive Boss? Retrieved from: https://hbr.org/2018/01/how-to-deal-with-a-passive-aggressive-boss
It is always a positive point to have such a caring and interested boss who values the time and work experience as such boss you describe. For a boss to impact an employee and drastically change their lives is what most employees want when entering a workplace. As you begin to talk about the future boss who took place of the one who passed away, this became more of a dictator rather than one who led. You input a couple great references and upheld your main point of abuse of power from certain leaders and how that can impact an employee. The end resolution of your situation seemed to have been agreed upon by corporate as they relieved that employee of her position and questioned all employees involved. This part shows the care invested by the corporate company headquarters and the impact they hold a manager to have on said employees such as yourself. Your last statement is very true and if someone does have skewed actions in a management position, they should be held accountable and called out professionally within HR. “According to Mental Health America’s examination of over 17,000 employees across 19 industries, 64% of employees don’t feel their boss provides them adequate support, and another survey found that 44% of employees have left a job because of a bad boss” (Ron, 2018).
References:
1) Carucci, Ron. (2018). How to Deal with a Passive Aggressive Boss. Retrieved from: https://hbr.org/2018/01/how-to-deal-with-a-passive-aggressive-boss
It is always a positive point to have such a caring and interested boss who values the time and work experience as such boss you describe. For a boss to impact an employee and drastically change their lives is what most employees want when entering a workplace. As you begin to talk about the future boss who took place of the one who passed away, this became more of a dictator rather than one who led. You input a couple great references and upheld your main point of abuse of power from certain leaders and how that can impact an employee. The end resolution of your situation seemed to have been agreed upon by corporate as they relieved that employee of her position and questioned all employees involved. This part shows the care invested by the corporate company headquarters and the impact they hold a manager to have on said employees such as yourself. Your last statement is very true and if someone does have skewed actions in a management position, they should be held accountable and called out professionally within HR.