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Welcome to Stuff I Learned Yesterday. My name is Darrell Darnell, I now have a visual reminder of my goals posted in my studio, and I believe that if you aren’t learning, you aren’t living. In today’s episode of Stuff I Learned Yesterday I share a lesson about failing, despite reaching my goals.
We have a new segment that we’re adding to Stuff I Learned Yesterday this year. If you like it, it was my idea, if you hate it, it was Mark’s idea. Okay, well really it was Mark’s idea and I think it’s a good one. It’s our Fun Fact of the Day segment. Today’s fun fact is: Did you know that an ostrich’s eyeball is bigger than its brain?
Friday Forum
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What I Learned Yesterday:
Today I’ll be wrapping up my series on goals. I hope this series of episodes has been helpful for you and has inspired you to dream big for 2015. As I bring this series to a close, I’d like to share a different perspective on goals. I want to share a story that taught me that it is possible to achieve goals and still fail. How is that possible? It’s possible when we miss the point and focus too much on goals and not enough on the other things around us.
In the summer of 2002 I was offered a position within the bookstore chain I was working at that I had wanted for a long time. It was a job that dreamed about getting soon after I began working with the company 8 years prior. The position was the position of buyer.
I had interviewed for a buying position 4 or 5 years prior, but the position had been given to someone else. I kept working hard and doing my best, and eventually another chance came along to interview for a buying position. The position was in the book department. I was offered the position and my first day on the job was attending the biggest trade show of the year.
I really didn’t know what was involved with buying. I had no experience buying merchandise and the only knowledge I had of the position was via the interaction and conversations I had had with various buyers within the company during my years of working there. I thought the position would be challenging and I thought it would get me behind a computer all day. Both of those things were attractive qualities to me.
Despite not having any buying experience, I was given a tremendous amount of responsibility. I didn’t know it until several months after I’d started the job, but I was personally responsible for ordering more individual items than any other buyer in the company. I was responsible for over 13,000 items.
Fortunately, I didn’t have to do the job alone. I had a fantastic assistant that was already in place when I took the position. What I didn’t know at the time was that she was passed over for the position and wasn’t too happy that she was not given the job. Now, she was always professional and I really enjoyed working with her. She never let her disappointment compromise her job performance. However, when she got pregnant a few months later, she really didn’t feel a lot of loyalty to the company.
When she left for maternity leave, my boss decided that I would shoulder all of her duties along with mine until she came back. This made my job incredibly challenging and meant that I was indeed ordering all 13,000 items by myself. This challenged became even more difficult when, at the end of her maternity leave, my assistant decided that she was going to make her leave permanent and become a stay-at-home mom. By the way, she totally made the right decision. She and I are still friends and she’s has an amazing family.
For us at the office, her decision had a big impact. It meant that we would begin the process of finding a replacement. On top of all the other things that were going on, I now had to start making phone calls and conducting interviews. After a month or so of looking, I found the person I felt was the right candidate. I scheduled a meeting with my boss to let him know.
The meeting immediately took an unexpected turn, but you’ll have to wait a few minutes before I tell you what happened.
Up to this point I haven’t really told you anything about the job or my goals. Those are obviously an important part of this story.
About six months after I started the job it was time for everyone’s annual review. This was my first review under my new boss. During the review we discussed some of the improvements I’d made and some areas that I needed to grow. You know, typical stuff for those types of meetings. We also set up my goals for the year during that meeting.
My goals for that year were were pretty standard. They were the same goals that the position had before, except that there was an expectation to improve upon the performance numbers of the previous year. For example, one of the goals was to have a higher average in stock percentage for my items than the previous year. Another goal was to have a lower inventory dollar amount than the previous year. Other goals involved an inventory spread, overstock low mark, etc.
As you probably are well aware by now, I’m a very goal focused person. If I’m given a goal to reach, I will focus on that and keep it in my sights. Very seldom do I let a goal fall off my radar. I may fail to reach a goal, but it’s not usually because I lost sight of it.
So it was about 6 months after my annual review that my assistant had her baby. It was another 3 months before she made the decision to not come back. After another month I found the right candidate, and I scheduled a meeting with my boss to let him know about my decision and to get his approval.
During that entire time, I was struggling with the regular day-to-day duties. I remember one fall day I had a meeting with my boss where he gave me even more responsibility. I was already drowning and not able to keep up. As I went out to my car that day I was at a loss. One of my co-workers saw the look on my face and asked me what was wrong. I told him about the situation and I said that I couldn’t figure out why he’d given me even more responsibility. I told my co-worker that my boss either believed in me more than I did, or he was purposefully setting me up for failure.
Now back to that meeting where I was going to tell my boss that I’d found someone to fill the assistant position.
I went into his office and sat down. I pulled out the papers I had with all of my notes so that I could go over everything with him. However, before I could begin, he spoke up. He said that he was aware that I had made a decision, but he had changed his mind. He wanted to restructure some things so he had decided to take over filling the position himself. Instead of having an assistant buyer, he was going to add a full buyer that would be able to take more of the load that I had been bearing.
While that was great news, it meant all the work I’d done to find a new assistant was in vain. Furthermore, It took him two more months to find someone he liked. By the time he found a replacement, I’d been without an assistant for a full 6 months. It had also been the 3rd and 4th quarters, the busiest time of year for retail.
Almost exactly 11 years ago today he called me in his office to tell me he’d found a new buyer. I had been responsible for 3 sub-departments that comprised much of the book department. My boss had decided to give me two of those sub-departments, and give the third one to the new buyer. Additionally, the new buyer would be taking over a sub-department from another area as he was restructuring things.
All of his decisions made sense except for one. The two sub-departments he gave the new buyer were the two that I was most knowledgeable and interested in. I couldn’t figure out why he’d give them to someone else. Two weeks later I got my answer. He called me into his office again and let me know that he’d hired someone else. That person was my replacement and he was letting me go.
Needless to say, I was in total shock.
Here’s what I learned.
While the way my boss handled the situation in replacing me was pretty terrible, he made the right decision. I was a bad fit for that job. I think it’s pretty easy to look at this story and feel like I wasn’t given a fair shot or a good opportunity to succeed. I wouldn’t say that.
When my boss told me that he had replaced me, I tried to make my case. By that time we had reached the end of the year and I knew how I was performing on all of my goals. I believe I had 6 goals that year and I had achieved 4 of them. The 2 goals that I didn’t achieve were still improvements on where they were the year before. So I made the argument that I had performed better in every area that they had asked me to.
While he acknowledged that I had done well in those areas, there were other areas where I had not performed well. One of my biggest mistakes was that I had completely failed to order any books for advent. Customers were coming into our stores expecting to be able to buy books for advent, and I had not ordered a single book for any store.
I dropped the ball in other areas too. Sure, one could argue that it was because I was being asked to do more than any one person could do, but I was responsible there too. I was terribly disorganized and, therefore, inefficient. The reason I didn’t order advent books was that I was disorganized, not that I was overwhelmed.
Furthermore, I never once approached my boss and told him that I needed help. I was too proud to admit that I was unable to do the job. I didn’t want to admit defeat. I chose to keep quiet and allow him to give me more work when I knew I was already behind. When I realized that I didn’t order the Advent books I didn’t go to him and tell him. Instead I chose to ignore it and hope that he didn’t notice.
What I learned is that goals don’t matter at all if you don’t take care of business. For example, I want to add 10 new production clients and 30 consulting clients this year. That’s a great goal, but I can’t let it cause me to lose sight of the clients I already serve. Serving my existing clients should always be my number one goal and priority.
There are a lot of great things that I learned from this experience. I am a much better person and business person today because I totally failed at being a buyer. I am a better communicator and much more organized because I failed a being a buyer.
I will always be grateful for my time as a buyer because of the lessons I learned, not the least of which is that it’s possible to hit the target and still miss the mark. May all of us keep proper perspective this year, and take care of the things that matter most.
I’m Darrell Darnell and this has been stuff I learned yesterday.
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