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Welcome to Stuff I Learned Yesterday. My name is Darrell Darnell, today I finished my third book of the year, and I believe if you aren’t learning, you aren’t living. In today’s episode of Stuff I Learned Yesterday I share a valuable lesson I learned about communication and reconciliation.
Today’s Fun Fact of the Day is: In the U.S, frisbees outsell footballs, baseballs and basketballs combined.
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What I Learned Yesterday:
When I was 24 years old I took over the store manager position of a bookstore in Texas. I was responsible for not only managing nearly a million dollars in inventory, but the staff of about 30 people. As anyone who has been in management can tell you, managing people is by far the harder part of the job.
By that time I had worked for the company for 6 years and had spent the previous 10 months specifically training to run my own store. Still, I was not fully prepared to for the job when I accepted it. Honestly though, I think it’s one of those jobs where you can never be fully prepared until you actually do it and get real world on the job training.
I managed the store for almost exactly 2 years before I accepted the job at the corporate office that I mentioned yesterday. When I first stepped foot in that store I never would have dreamed all the things I would experience in the 2 years that would follow.
I had an old lady fall and break a hip while leaving the store. I had a kid slide head first across the tile and face plant into the shelving, causing his head to slice open. I had a major roof leak during a heavy spring rain that flooded nearly half the store and ruining tens of thousands of dollars of merchandise.
I had my first experience with firing an employee, I had the boyfriend of an employee show up, go into the breakroom, and punch her, and I even got into a shouting match with a truck driver.
It was an incredible learning experience filled with many more highs than lows, and I wouldn’t trade it for the world.
During my time there I hired a woman, let’s call her Martha, to oversee our education department. That department had supplies for public school teachers, home school teachers, and Sunday school teachers.
During the Easter season we had a particular item that sold really well every year. However, during my second year at the store, we didn’t receive any of that item. When I called the corporate office to ask about it, they pulled up the invoices and showed that we should have received quite a few of the item. I asked Martha about it, but she didn’t recall seeing any of the item come in.
Martha looked all over the stock room and all around the store, but she could not locate the item. I also looked all over the stock room and all over the store, but I couldn’t locate the item either. I again called the corporate office to double check that our shipment had actually been sent out, and all their records indicated that our supply had been sent to us.
Again Martha and I searched the store, and again our search came up empty.
About a week or so after Easter had passed I was back in the stock room working. There, plain as day, was our shipment of the item. I’d like to say that it had been packaged differently than previous years or that it was in a spot where it should not have been, but that’s not the case.
To this day I don’t know how Martha and I both overlooked it so many times, but we did. It was right in front of our faces, and we’d missed it. Now we’d have to mark them down and lose money on them.
Martha had the late shift that day. When she came in I brought her back to the stock room and showed her the boxes of the item. I laughed at the situation. After all, what else could I do? Getting mad about it wouldn’t help.
Shortly after that Martha had a life changing event. I was working in the back room or in my office when one of the other employees rushed up to me. They told me that Martha had just received a phone call telling her that her daughter and grand children had been in a terrible car accident and Martha had left to go be with them.
Of course, I had no problem that Martha had left during the middle of her shift. She obviously needed to be with her family. I don’t recall if her daughter survived the accident or not. I don’t believe she did. I do know for sure that 2 of her grandchildren did not survive.
I told Martha to take as much time as she needed and come back to work only when she was ready. When she did come back, she wasn’t the same. How could she be? At that point in my life I had never had anyone close to me die. I had no idea what she was going through. Besides that, she lost members of her family that you aren’t supposed to lose. I was not only clueless, I was clueless that I was clueless.
Soon after she returned, I got a letter from Martha. The letter told me that she was quitting. She then went on to say quite a few things about me that stunned me.
She was upset with me for laughing at her when I found the lost item in the stock room. She was upset with me for allowing her to leave the store alone when she found out about the accident. She was almost in an accident herself as she rushed to be with her family. She was also upset with me that I didn’t send a card or flowers, or even attend any of the funerals. She had already found a new job at another store in town, and she was leaving my store effective immediately.
She went on to criticize me as a manager, as a person, and as a Christian. Apparently she’d been bottling some things up for a while.
Here’s what I learned.
Needless to say, reading her letter left me in shock. I had no idea that I had offended her in any way. There were some things in the letter that revealed some pretty big mistakes that I had inadvertently made, and there were some things in the letter that were simply not true. To her perspective they were true, but I felt like if I could share my perspective, then she would have a better understanding. And if she could share her perspective, then I would have a better understanding.
I wasn’t sure if she’d want to talk to me or not, but I reached out to her to try and arrange a time when we could chat. I wanted to offer her an apology and attempt to end our time together on a more positive note. Fortunately, she agreed.
It seems so obvious now, but I was a clueless idiot. I don’t know why I didn’t go to the funeral. I really should have. However, we did send flowers on behalf of all of the employees at the store. Somehow in the chaos of the moment, Martha had missed that fact. I don’t blame her for missing that detail. After all, that was probably the last thing on her mind during the funeral. But again, I should have been there in person and I regret that.
I explained to her that I didn’t let her leave the store alone. I didn’t even know about the circumstances until after she had left the store. Still, I don’t think I would have had the foresight to offer to drive her to her family or have someone else drive her. I had no idea that she’d almost been in a wreck. Her letter was the first time I’d heard about that so I wasn’t sure why she was trying to hold be responsible for that.
I also explained that I wasn’t laughing at her in the stock room that day. I was laughing at the situation. I was every bit as responsible for overlooking the Easter item as she was. Apparently she was offended the moment I laughed, but never told me.
So what do you think I learned from this situation? There’s a lot here to learn. So much, in fact, that as I’ve added years of experience to my life, I continue to look back at this situation and learn from it.
In the moments of our conversation together I apologized to Martha for not being more supportive during the days surrounding the loss of her family. While benevolence in general is a weakness of mine, I truly should have been more aware of her needs. That’s truly one of my biggest regrets of my tenure as the store manager. I had a great opportunity to come along side one of my employees and show her great love and support. Instead, I left her feeling unloved, and alone.
She also apologized for some of the ways she had questioned my character and wrongfully accused me.
When she left, we were on much better terms. So good, in fact, that when her new boss didn’t turn out to be as good as she thought, she came back and asked if she could have her old job back. I would have given it back to her in a second, but I had already filled it and didn’t have a spot I could give her.
I think that the biggest lesson here is that when Martha, or I, or any of us make decisions based on emotion, we often make an error. Furthermore, when we allow things to stack up and fester inside of us, they only do us harm.
If Martha had told me that my laugh had offended her when it happened, we could have talked it out and hugged it out then and there. It wouldn’t have still been sitting in her mind as an unresolved issue that could then get attached to an unrelated situation down the road.
But Martha’s not alone. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve made that same mistake. I think most of us really need to do a better job of properly communicating issues to people when an offense happens. From my experience, nearly all of these types of issues turn out to be a simple misunderstanding.
When we face difficult, emotional situations, we need to find some way to get through those situations objectively. Emotion makes it nearly impossible to do that sometimes. Now, I don’t have all the answers for these types of situations. All I can tell you is that when I’ve been in highly emotional, life changing situations, I try to find a voice of wisdom from a respected friend who is not emotionally attached to the situation. Sometimes that’s been my wife, other times it’s been my pastor, and other times it’s been a peer or older person in my life.
But I also think that one of the biggest things I learned here was about reconciliation. Because Martha and I sat down and talked through her letter, we both gained wisdom and came to a better understanding. We were both better when we left that meeting than we were when we started. We both discovered mistakes we’d made and offered apologies to the wronged person. Because of that, we maintained a positive relationship.
And that’s what matters most. Relationships matter most because they represent people. Without people, we have no relationships. Seek reconciliation as often and as soon as possible. Life is too short to pass up those opportunities.
I’m Darrell Darnell and this has been stuff I learned yesterday.
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