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I’m normally a chill person, but from time to time I lose my composure. Today I share the story of the day I got so angry at work, my assistant told me it would be better if I went home.
Welcome to Stuff I Learned Yesterday. This is episode 676, “Fueled By Anger.” According to Crown Consulting, the average adult experiences anger approximately 14 times per week and about 30% of adults report trouble controlling their anger. I’m Darrell Darnell and I believe that if you aren’t learning, you aren’t living.
Today’s story takes us back to the days when I was the ecommerce director for a bookstore chain. Like all retail businesses, we had steady business throughout the year with seasons that brought in waves of above average business. As you might expect, Christmas was one such season. But for us, we had another season that rivaled the Christmas season. That was the back-to-school season near the end of summer.
We had a large selection of classroom decor and teaching supplies, and teachers would load up on these as they began to prepare their classrooms for the upcoming school year. We also ran an annual sale for that season, which helped increase our sales even further.
Like most systems, it’s the busy and outlier types of days that put stress on them and have a higher chance of exposing flaws. As you might imagine, our ecommerce system required communication between various other computer systems and the front end of the website. It also required coordination between our team and other teams within our facility.
In short, before the website could confirm an order, it needed to send a ping to our warehouse inventory system to ensure that stock was available. The system naturally did this throughout the day, but it also did this one last time just before checkout as a safety.
Once an order was submitted, the inventory was earmarked for that order and the order was placed into a batch. Twice per day batches were processed. The warehouse manager was responsible for the accuracy of the inventory in the warehouse, so that meant that he did not allow anyone from my team to access inventory. Only he and his team were allowed to do that.
He already had early morning shifts that were on location pulling inventory for our stores hours before anyone showed up on the office side of the facility. So someone from his team would deploy a batch and his team would then pull all of the items for that batch. By the time my team showed up at 8:30, the first batches would be there waiting for us to process. It was a system that worked well most of the time.
When his team processed a batch, they did not pull items according to orders. That meant that we received a variety of items in tubs and boxes, and it was then up to us to go through all of that merchandise and sort it into each respective order. There were other systems in place that helped us identify which item went with each order, but it was still very much a manual sorting process.
Because of this, we had to be mindful of the physical space we had available to work and sort orders, and batches were capped at a certain number of orders. On most days, our batch limit was 90 orders at a time. We might come in and have 3 or 4 batches to process, but each batch was divided up and we could work them a batch at a time.
However, on days when we were processing a lot of educational supply orders, that order limit was reduced to 70. Teacher orders often included bulletin board decorations and storage bins which take up much more physical space than books and CDs. This meant we didn’t have the physical space to process 90 orders at a time.
So when these days came, we coordinated with the warehouse to make sure they changed the batch parameter to 70 instead of the default of 90. We would have preferred to have access to control that ourselves, but that never happened.
On a normal day, we could handle sorting and shipping all the orders with a team of 2-4 people. But on those seasonal sale days, it was all hands on deck. I’d try to hire some extra hands for those weeks. In addition to that, both myself and my assistant, Courtney, would help sort and pack orders. On extremely busy days, other departments would come down and help us sort and pack.
For us, it was also important to plan ahead for these days. Courtney and I sat down with our shipping supervisor, Jason, and game planned on how to handle the extra volume, which jobs we would assign to the other workers that came down to help us, and we did as much as we could to prepare shipping supplies. So on the morning of our annual education sale, we walked into the building expecting an avalanche of orders and our minds were ready for the challenging day ahead. For me, I walked in focused, excited, and eager to face the challenge.
However, I walked through the door to our shipping area and immediately knew we had a problem. The warehouse worker had botched the batch. He didn’t cap it at 70 as we’d requested. It wasn’t even capped at 90. It wasn’t capped at all. There were HUNDREDS and HUNDREDS of orders all combined into a single massive batch.
Remember, we only had the physical space to sort and process 70 orders. I had no idea how we could process the behemoth that surrounded us. Courtney, Jason, and I stood there in utter shock and disbelief. Maybe we were mistaken! We each looked through the overwhelming number of crates, carts, and boxes. Our fears were confirmed: the warehouse had pulled it all in one batch.
I was furious. I quickly made my way over to the warehouse manager’s office and let myself in. Nerves on edge and out of breath from running to his office, I took a deep breath and tried to calm myself. He could tell by the look on my face that something was wrong. After explaining the situation to him he called the team member who distributed the batches. It confirmed what we already knew. Instead of changing the number to 70, he accidentally deleted it and hit enter before he realized it.
The damage was done. The genie was out of the bottle. There was no way to go back and fix the mistake. We all knew it. My team and I would have to find a way to sort the orders and get them out the door.
By the time I made my way back to our shipping area, Jason was furious. I was furious too. Jason raised his voice and said something to me that effectively accused me of being at fault. I really don’t recall much of what happened next. I yelled something back at him. He cursed me out. I yelled back. It was all an emotion-filled rage fest from both of us and I don’t even know what I was saying.
Finally Courtney stepped in, literally. She stood in between us, stretched her arms outward like Chris Pratt standing between those velociraptors in Jurassic World and yelled, “STOP!” She looked over at me with a scowl and a look of disgust. “Darrell, go to your office!” Then she turned her gaze to Jason and said, “Jason, go to the breakroom!” And that’s just what we did.
I sat down at my desk and took some deep breaths. A moment later she ripped into my office and put me in my place. She told me to go home. She recognized that if what I’d just shown was the level of leadership I was going to bring that day, then they would be more productive without me.
Here’s what I learned.
Courtney was right. My leadership that day was abysmal. My team needed and deserved better. Instead, I allowed myself to get caught up in the emotion. And to be fair, Jason did too.
But here’s the thing. I wasn’t mad at Jason. And I’d bet money that he wasn’t mad at me. He knew I wasn’t at fault. Both of us were mad at the situation and took our anger out on the person standing in front of them.
Maybe it’s just me, but that’s been my experience on most occasions when I’ve allowed myself to be controlled by anger. That is, I’ve expressed that anger at the wrong person. My kid doesn’t do something I want? My spouse embarrassed me? A client stops doing business with my company?
When I allow myself to examine why I’m angry, it often points the finger back at me. My pride. My feelings of failure as a parent. My financial stress and worry. In this case with Jason, I wasn’t angry at me, but I certainly wasn’t angry at him either. I was just angry and took it out on the human shaped punching bag in front of me. He didn’t deserve that.
After we each took a moment to cool down, we gathered back at the scene of the crime. Together as a team, we devised a system that would get us through the day. It was wildly less efficient than it would have been if we’d received the orders as we should have, but we would get through it.
And we did. It took us all day, and that afternoon’s batch had to wait until the next day, but we did get through it.
Once the work was done Jason and I sat down in my office. We both apologized. He was sure he’d be fired for cussing me out. We both acknowledged that cussing me out was inappropriate, and it wouldn’t be tolerated again. But I also owned up to my poor leadership and how I’d let my emotions get the best of me and fail as a leader.
There is a time and place for righteous anger. Jesus was angry at times and the Bible even tells us to be angry and sin not. But when we let anger control us, we’ve crossed a line that leads to mistakes and ends in regret. “Whoever is slow to anger has great understanding, but he who has a hasty temper exalts folly.”
I’m Darrell Darnell, and this has been Stuff I Learned Yesterday.
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