How I Was Able to Earn Respect as a New Manager
My direct reports didn’t care about my fancy degree. But they did care about these five things.
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When I finished grad school, I walked off the podium with a boatload of confidence, an MBA degree inscribed with fancy Latin words, and sheer obliviousness about what it actually means to lead a team of people.
I was hired as an assistant store manager of a Target store and given the keys to a multimillion-dollar retail operation and a team of 50 people.
I quickly discovered that I had no clue what I was doing.
My team stretched both ends of the age spectrum: pimply 16-year-olds who stumbled upon Target as their first job and curmudgeonly 60-year-olds for whom Target would be their last job before waltzing into the golden fields of retirement.
Neither demographic had any reason to respect me.
After all, why would they? I had a fancy degree but zero retail experience aside from measuring shoe sizes at my local Big 5 Sporting Goods during Christmas break.
I was a cocksure 24-year-old who had suddenly become “the boss.”
Early on, I made a lot of management mistakes, but eventually, I was able to earn the trust of the majority of the team, and our team began to produce some of the top results in the district.
The five things below helped me earn the team’s respect:
1. I volunteered for the toughest job.
Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, our store received a new truck jam-packed with diapers, cat food, electronics, tennis rackets, and a treasure trove of other items itching to fill empty shelf space on our sales floor.
Each truck contained up to 2,800 boxes of product.
I found out early on that the most physically demanding job on the team was “throwing the truck,” which was slang for being one of the two people inside the truck who unloaded each box onto the “line” — a conveyor belt that carried the products to other employees who sorted the supplies.
The two people who unloaded the truck each day would get bruised, battered, and sore…
