A Path to Leadership
Do you remember your path to leadership? What you did to get you from your first job to one where you led, ACTUALLY led, others? What was it?
I certainly remember mine. The first job I had outside our family’s business was at the movie theater in the late 1990s. I tore tickets. I didn’t know why I tore them or why I kept a particular side of the torn ticket, only that I tore them and kept the “right” half. When I had some down time, I would count them in stacks of 50 and rubber band them. At the end of the night, I would put those banded stacks of 50 into a brown paper bag and write the number of tickets on the outside of the bag. It wasn’t a bad job for a high schooler, and there were other duties involved, but that was how my path to leadership began, knowing that I didn’t want to JUST do that for the rest of my career.
Next, I added cleaning the auditoriums as an usher to my skill set at this job. Where I worked, there was almost always a film ending and cleaning required. There was a schedule to keep, other ushers to assist, SO MUCH TRASH, and the dreaded “usher juice,” a concoction of all the liquids thrown away and cleaned up that would cover you, if the trash bag had a hole of any size near the bottom. It wasn’t particularly hard work, but it did require more effort than tearing tickets. I knew I could do more. I learned how to work in the concession stand, serving patrons their movie-going snacks, as well as the box office, being the first point of contact for most customers as they purchased their ticket. Still easy work, but my repertoire grew, making me more valuable to the managers when it came time to make the schedule.
Then, I took an unusual step. I started coming into work early and staying later to observe, outside my schedule, the fascinating world that took place upstairs in the projection booth. The projector, sound rack, and the platters were wondrous machines that caught my interest the first time I carried delivered film cans to the projection booth. I looked at everything, asked questions, and followed “Pep” around the booth, catching anything I could. I watched films being “built” and broken down. I watched how the trailers were added, and what happened when you had something disastrous happen to disturb the continuity of a movie being projected. I asked Pep how someone became a projectionist and found out that it just happened when the need arose. I mentioned my interest in it, and he laughed, because he already knew. After all, I was at work on my day off, pestering him about the job he enjoyed partially due to the solitude and freedom to study that it offered. He then shared with me that they were already “talking about it” among the management.
I cannot tell you the joy I felt a few weeks later, when I saw I had a training shift in the projection booth. The sponge that I was, I devoured the mechanics, the reasoning, the maintenance, and the routine in a very short time. What happened next was even more joyous: I received a raise due to my rapid knowledge gain and utility to the theater… Thirty five cents more per hour, up to $5.50 from minimum wage at the time. The raise wasn’t the exciting part, rather it was the acknowledgement that I wanted to be doing more than just tearing tickets, cleaning up auditoriums, and selling drinks, popcorn, and tickets. I was now trusted with the job that made people come to our theater, showing the movie itself.
Soon after I began working in the projection booth, the company I worked for made a big change. The prospect of a unionization among those doing the specialized work in the booth scared them into making every projectionist in the company into a “manager.” The idea was that if they had varied duties, a management title, and a slight pay increase, the union wouldn’t take hold. In practice, this just meant that they had a bit more freedom in their work attire, made slightly more money, and made the duties a bit harder to acquire, yet the projectionist-made-manager still worked in the booth nearly all of the time.
I started college shortly after this change, and I transferred to a location closer to school that afforded me the opportunity to work more than the weekends I went home to visit. The week after I started there, a new general manager from another state joined the theater. He embraced the idea of making the projectionists and managers interchangeable, toeing the company line, and my role changed almost immediately to one where I would be handling managerial duties, in addition to everything that I’d learned to that point.
For me, there was a learning curve. I’d never managed other people before, and the “power” of it was interesting, as I learned even more about the business side of things. Money handling was a breeze, as was being a conduit to provide needed items to the staff, but I struggled with how to manage people. The general manager I worked with could see that I excelled in the areas that didn’t involve the staff I managed, and we spoke at length about whether I wanted to do this for a living. Being a freshman in college, I expected that this would continue to be a part time job until graduation, and I would then depart for a “real” job. He understood, but offered to help me get better at the people part of the job for as long as we worked together. This was when I began to understand that I didn’t need to manage people. I needed to lead them.
What’s your story?
