1. Trust
Scale Rating: 8
There is some distinctive elements of trust within my small circle of co-workers and superiors at Sherwin-Williams. Focus will be given to the elements of Behavioral consistency, integrity, and demonstrations of concern.
In line with behavioral consistency, my manager has a tendency to be very inconsistent with his behaviors and personality. I have come to believe that much of this is due to his short temper. One example of this is how he can go from praising my hard work and dedication to the store to suddenly heavily criticizing me for accidentally charging a customer for a transaction that I shouldn't have, an easily fixable mistake that happens regularly and takes literally less than 5 minutes to correct. In this situation and others like it, it is hard to foster trust with my manager when I cannot be certain where I stand.
My manager also has issues with behavioral integrity, being prone to making idle promises and doing nothing about them. This includes things such as frequent acknowledgment of the problems with the assistant manager but does nothing to fix them or at least provide support by letting us know he wont punish us or will at least be forgiving if we attempt to confront the issues with the assistant manager. Similarly, he also makes promises such as giving me a raise that he said he would push through over 2 months ago but has still to even meet with me to discuss it. This type of behavior makes it very difficult to believe anything he says or to even feel motivated at work.
One area he does excel in is demonstration of concern. Although his behaviors may be inconsistent he does frequently make a point of indicating appreciation for your efforts, and although he doesn't follow through, there is something nice about being recognized for deserving a raise. Overall, his ability to show concern for our well-being as employees does enough to help me forgive his shortcomings in other areas and still feel like he is a good manager overall.
2. Immediacy
Scale Value: 6
There is distinct variation between the immediacy levels at my Sherwin-Williams location between manager and assistant manager situations. Where my manager excels in most of the aspects of this concept, my assistant manager falls far short.
Expression of appreciation of work is something my manager regularly does through text (since we rarely if ever see each other in person) basically every time I send him the list of things to do for the next week since I usually work weekends. On the contrary my assistant manager literally has never expressed appreciation for anyone's efforts at work, and she has been at the store nearly 6 months longer than the current manager.
Similarly, the assistant manager demonstrates no willingness to assist with tasks, preferring to criticize mistakes and jump in to take over when your not doing things her way. She lacks any willingness to help with tasks that are also her responsibility, such as unloading truck inventory in the store, instead preferring to disappear into the office to "make sales calls" though it is clear that she is lackadaisically going about this task or is simply the slowest sales call maker in history. She further will actually delegate her job responsibilities, such as batching which involves the filling and logging of receipts and transactions, to my co-workers who already perform all the daily store maintenance and management functions.
While she is very task oriented and has an air of believing her way and opinion are always correct, our actually manager does some good at balancing that toxicity by being the polar opposite. While he is useless for getting paperwork and organization done, he excels at communication and making people feel as though he truly values their opinions. He makes this behavior most evident during store meetings when he will open up the floor to each employee individually, and asks if there is anything he or the assistant manager can do to make our jobs easier or more accommodating. I think he partly does this because he understands the frustrations of the job and our disdain with the assistant manager, but also knows he can't and is unwilling to do anything about it respectively.
3. Providing and Seeking Feedback
Part One:
There was only one instance of official feedback provided to me as an employee in the form of a performance review. Occasionally updates on performance and small tasks to improve on are given at store meetings, but only once a year is an official performance review given, prior to raises being distributed. My review was given by our previous manager and consisted of both positive and negative feedback with some initial disclaimers. The review basically covered statistical goals such as number of sales calls made, number of new accounts opened by type, number of line items sold on each transaction, and so forth. However, my manager at the time made clear that the goal objectives (which are never told to us prior to the review) are set to be unrealistic. In this sense I suppose some strategic ambiguity was involved simply in that she chose to repeatedly outline that the goals were arbitrary and meaningless but that they are also important and should be strived for, with no real details on the reasoning behind the unrealistic goal setting or who was responsible for it. Overall, I believe the review helped me to get a grasp on some of the metrics used by the company to rate performance, and get a better idea of what they really want out of employees, sales. I believe it made me view the company in a more negative light, and I struggled not to feel the same toward my manager as she critiqued me on what seemed to be ridiculous goals and details while failing to acknowledge my above average work performance and dedication, inherently making me less productive and motivated for a short time.
Part Two:
The few times I have had my superior seek feedback from me was when our current manager asks us how we feel about the way things are going and encourages us directly to express any concerns or issues we may have with him. Specifically, he has asked me on multiple occasions about anything he or the other employees can do to make my job easier (since I work the weekend shifts alone and still manage to get more done than anyone during the week). In one of those moments I remember saying that nothing in-particular came to mind, just making sure the store is clean and ready to go on Saturday mornings rather than the complete disarray it is usually left in, though I didn't mention the last part. Along with not mentioning the typically dire state the store is left in on Friday nights to Saturday mornings, I also forwent the opportunity to discuss some of the issues we have been long having with the assistant manager. The opportunity to express my opinions made me feel great but also anxious and nervous, I was so use to superiors not caring what subordinates think I wasn't sure how to react or what would be appropriate to say.
4. Upward Influence
The use of upward influence by subordinates in an organization is more common today than it probably has ever been. As workers become more comfortable and feel that a growing number of organizations are championing employee rights, they feel more able and willing to stick their necks out and express their opinions and concerns.
While I have no examples of such dynamic events in my organization from the use of upward influencing strategies, I can provide one that demonstrates the usefulness of these techniques.
Our prior manager, and especially our prior assistant manager, were very much penny pinchers with the store budget and resources. They frequently refused to throw away old and useless stuff that blocked up warehouse storage space and made it more difficult to work in the backroom just in case we might need it one day. Old paint supplies, shelving metal, drywall and plywood boards, old signs, and left over remodeling supplies were among the numerous sources of clutter in our warehouse. While I rarely concern myself with trying to influence my superiors, often preferring to exist in my own bubble, I saw the coming of a new manager as the perfect time to change this incredibly irritating situation. My first question upon meeting my new manager was to ask how he felt about throwing things away. We had a small discussion about it and he came to the conclusion that I had been at the store longer and he was going to trust my judgement as to what could be thrown away or not.
This was perhaps the most validated and appreciated I have ever felt at the company, simply because it mattered and made sense to me. In my mind there was absolutely no use for any of the clutter in the store, and even in the unlikely event that we ever needed something I throw away, we could just order more from corporate for roughly $50 or less. I do believe I used a mostly open persuasion strategy, largely because he was a new manager and there were no pre-established norms of communication or assumptions about personality. That being said, I did use some strategic persuasion in my lack of detail on what exactly I would be throwing away, with our new manager assuming it would be small incidental stuff, but in reality I planned on, and did, throw away thousands of dollars in old shelving, boards, products, etc. that I correctly believed had no use. While my sudden and quick cleaning out of the back room took our new manager by surprise, he quickly saw all the extra storage space I was creating and enjoyed the lack of clutter, especially since I keep up on making sure we don't start saving useless stuff again.
5. Upward Dissent
The only real use of upward dissent in my organization has been when attempting to discuss issues with and solutions for our latest assistant manager. I had long discussions with our prior manager on the issues, but her interests lied more in gossiping about it rather than addressing it. I have since also discussed the issue in small minor talks with our current manager, but to a much less intense degree.
During these discussion I believe I employed the first 3 of the five strategies of upward dissent, including direct factual appeals, solution presentation, and circumvention.
The use of the circumvention technique was only idly used but is important to point out in that ideally I should discuss the issues I have with my assistant manager with her directly and allow her the opportunity to hear and understand what I have to say and respond to my grievances or justify her actions in some way. However, as previously outlined in this blog and other posts, that was in no way my chosen course of action.
Rather, I would frequently employ factual appeal with my manager at the time. Situations like a lack of cleaning up after herself, following through with customer orders, completing responsibilities, and trusting co-workers to properly do their jobs i.e. not intensely micromanaging, were large issues that frequently came up and I tried to express concern for. Being able to fully fill a customers order and stick to it, rather than suddenly asking a co-worker is already working on a customer order to take over your order so you can go suddenly make sales calls in the middle of the day, is a fundamental job responsibility and gross overreach of power. The company purposefully promotes sharing of responsibility and tasks between managers and employees, with emphasis on managers being their to train and guide employees, not take advantage of them to delegate tasks that managers don't feel like doing. Similarly our assistant manager has had a serious issue with being able to trust employees with helping customers and making the correct product recommendations, and on more than one occasion has actually stopped employees to criticize their choice of words when greeting or saying goodbye to customers. Both of these behaviors are logically and fundamentally bad for the organization and the superior-subordinate relationship, but they are also in violation of company values and policies for which managers are suppose to train and guide new members and be able to handle their own responsibilities rather than micro-managing insignificant details such as word choice and being unable to handle simple job tasks like loading five-gallon buckets into the shakers.
My solution presentation were far less evident and more intertwined with my factual appeals than they should have been, but after all how to you correct mismatches in personality? For awhile they attempted to make her more responsible for sales in an effort to help break her out of her shyness so she could more easily see and understand when she overstepped her bounds. While their is certainly value in this approach, it was clearly not producing adequate results, and I voiced the idea of doing the opposite. I suggested preventing her from doing office paperwork and forcing her to do the more hands on tasks of fully helping customers, unloading truck, and cleaning the store properly at night to give her a new or reaffirmed sense of not being any better than anyone else and the total scope of responsibility and task difficulty that we all deal with. I hoped it would help her see that she needs to be responsible for her own fate and we cant come running to safe her all the time, as well as that she needs to respect our opinions and professionalism to get the job done in our own ways. Currently, the attempts to support her and isolate her from the full-scope of her job responsibilities is still being tried, and hopefully will begin to yield better results.
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