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Welcome to Stuff I Learned Yesterday. My name is Darrell Darnell, every night at bed time my kids have a high five contest with me, and I believe that if you aren’t learning, you aren’t living. In today’s episode of Stuff I Learned Yesterday I share lessons I learned after being damaged by lies.
What do you do when someone lies about you and shows no remorse?
Today’s Fun Fact:
Since we’re talking about lying in today’s episode, let’s fill our fun fact section of the episode with some fact that sound like lies, but are actually true.
- Maine is the closest U.S. state to Africa.
- Cleopatra lived closer to the invention of the iPhone than she did to the building of the Great Pyramid.
- Home Alone was released closer to the moon landing than it was to today.
- New York City is further south than Rome, Italy.
- Pluto never made a full orbit around the sun from the time it was discovered to when it was declassified as a planet.
What I Learned Yesterday
Today’s story is one that I’ve been putting off for a while. In fact, I almost told this story last week and made a last minute change. It’s a story of one of the most frustrating, painful, and damaging things that ever happened to me during my nearly 19 year career at my previous job. Because of that, I’ve left out the names of the people in this story.
There is a lot to this story, and much more than I can share in the brief amount of time we have together today, but let me give you a little background. When I was promoted to the position of E-Commerce Director, I was given a job that didn’t previously exist. I got the job because of my knowledge of programming, store operations, and purchasing. I also understood new media and social media better than nearly everyone at the company at that time.
My team and I spent a lot of time researching and building a branch of the company that didn’t fit into our normal structure. All of our other stores got one big order each week delivered from our central warehouse. Our orders were shipped out a box at a time to people all over the world. Our stores communicated with their customers in person. We communicated with our customers via phone, email, and social media. Our stores were able to reach new customers by tapping into local media opportunities. We reached new customers with online ads on Google and Facebook.
As we explored various things and had ideas, we often took the approach that it was easier to ask forgiveness than permission. When there was significant money or impact on the overall company, we sought permission from my boss, the president of the company. I met with him weekly and we had a very similar philosophy about our online vision and initiatives. So I didn’t need to ask permission for most of the day to day decisions I was making.
Naturally, not everything we did worked, and we made mistakes along the way.
We had a lot of growing pains. We carried tens of thousands of products and not all of those products were ready for the web. We purchased a database from the largest distributor in our industry and tapped into data feeds from our vendors, but there were still a lot of gaps. Thousands of items had incomplete data. Those gaps ranged from dimensions and weight (which impacted shipping rates), to images, and product descriptions. Some of the products lacked even the most basic information.
So my team became responsible for physically going out to our warehouse to check each item and fill in the missing data. This meant we actually weighed, measured, and photographed thousands of items. We also ran the social media accounts for the company, ran online ads, shipped out all the orders, managed customer service, and negotiated rates on packaging supplies. We also worked directly with online technology companies for email campaigns, oversaw the coding for custom pages that changed weekly, and oversaw new development on the website. That’s a huge variety of skills required to run our division of the company and all of it was ultimately my responsibility.
As we took on some of these things, some of the other areas of the company had their own ideas of how things should be done. Interestingly, they almost never came to me directly with their ideas. Instead, they went above my head and issued their ideas to either my boss or the company CEO. Of course, most of the time their ideas were presented in way that undermined what we were doing while simultaneously selling themselves as the answer.
One person in particular that was notorious for this was the director of our marketing department. In the breakdown of our company, he and I were equals. We were both directors. However, some of the directors reported to the company president, while others reported to the CEO. Of course, the CEO outranked the president, so it was common for those reporting to him to get preferential treatment. The marketing director reported to the CEO.
One day while I was out on vacation, the marketing director took the opportunity to meet with the CEO and begin a campaign to make me look incompetent and foolish. After his meeting, he told some of his staff that they would be soon taking over several of the responsibilities that my department had been doing. After that, the rumor mill got busy. I was out in the middle of the Oklahoma River in a kayak when I got the call. It was my assistant and she was wanting to know why marketing was taking over many of her roles. Of course, I knew nothing about it.
When I returned from vacation, I was called into a meeting with the CEO and the marketing director. The marketing director had convinced the CEO that we were screwing things up and the CEO was prepared to give him several of our tasks. I fought back with facts and data. I showed them how well we were performing and showed metrics that revealed that we were doing better than many companies with much more money and exposure. The CEO allowed us to maintain control of the responsibilities, but it seemed like it was only a temporary victory.
However, major damage was done to me that day. The meeting was set in a casual format. Our CEO had four high backed chairs positioned around a coffee table in his office. The three of us sat at those chairs facing each other and went through each area of my division piece by piece. Interestingly, the marketing director did not want to take control of our online marketing campaigns with Google and Facebook. To me those were things that we never should have been doing, but they needed to be done and so we did them. He also didn’t want to take over the photography of our website, but to me, that didn’t seem like a task that my team should be in charge of. Still, he was quick to criticize the job we were doing with photography.
He told the CEO that buyers were coming to him and complaining about the photographs my team was providing for products. He said that the buyers told him that they had repeatedly asked me to take better photos, but nothing had been done. I knew that that was an outright lie. It was a lie to make me look like I was operating in a silo, that I didn’t care about the requests of other parts of the team, and it made it look like I was incompetent. This was not the first time the marketing director had made up a lie about a conversation he’d had with a buyer.
So I interrupted him. I called him out on his lie. I reminded him of the exact lie he had said about me before. I asked him to restate his story about photographs and to name the names of the people who had said it. I then told him and the CEO that I would follow up with them and report back with their version of the story.
I approached each of the buyers separately and asked them to tell me what happened. I tried to be as vague as possible as to not lead them in any way. Sure enough, both of their stories match each other, but neither of them matched the story of the marketing director. It turned out that they were complaining about the images for some jewelry. The images were all photos that the vendor had supplied. If a vendor supplied a photograph, then my team never got involved. We were only flagged for items that had no photo. In fact, both of the buyers also said that they were wanting my team to take new photos of the items so that the items would have good photos.
You won’t believe what happened next.
I scheduled a meeting with the CEO. At that meeting I reminded him of the marketing director’s story and he remembered. I then reminded him that I had called his story out as a lie. He remembered. I then told the CEO about the conversations I had with the buyers and how their stories matched each other, thus proving the lie. The CEO did nothing. He didn’t call in the marketing director to ask him about the lie. He didn’t even say that he would follow up with the marketing director about the lie. He told me that I needed to go work it out with the marketing director. What?!
So I went straight to my office and set up a meeting with the marketing director. We met either that same day or the very next day in his office. He refused to acknowledge the lie. He refused to acknowledge what he had said in the CEO’s office. He refused to even talk about it. He said that our conversation with the CEO was in the past and he wasn’t going to spend time rehashing what happened in the past. Mind you, that conversation had taken place less than a week prior, but he completely shut down the conversation and just sat there.
Nothing was ever done. Well that’s not true. Damage was done to MY character and the CEO’s confidence in my abilities was shattered. Nothing was the same after that.
About 8 months later, the president of the company resigned. I knew immediately that I was in trouble. He was my visionary companion. He was the one that had defended me time and time again when I had been attacked in closed door meetings with the CEO or marketing director. With him gone, the odds were not in my favor.
Sure enough, about 2 months later I got called into another meeting, but this time it was just the CEO. It was a quick meeting. He told me that I was losing control of nearly all of the responsibilities that I had developed. All of them were going to marketing. The decision was final.
Here’s What I Learned:
As I said earlier, this was one of the most frustrating, painful, and damaging things that ever happened to me during my nearly 19 year career at my previous job. I’m still not over it. I still have dreams about this situation and the people who were involved.
After the lies were told and accepted, I knew my days at the company were numbered. I lost so much respect for these two men that I knew I had to go if they didn’t fire me first. It was 22 months before I would finally say goodbye and they were extremely difficult. My attitude went down the toilet. I stopped trying to arrive to work early, and stopped working late. I started doing just enough to get things done, and rarely tried to go above and beyond. I wasn’t happy and my countenance showed. My new boss even scored me down on my next evaluation because of my poor attitude.
The people that took over the tasks were nice people, but they made a lot of mistakes. I know it sounds like sour grapes, and I’m sure some of it is, but I truly believe that we did a better job. The absolute truth is that the heart was ripped out of both me and my assistant who had worked tirelessly to develop these areas of our company from nothing to a point where other companies in our industry were taking notice of what we were doing. I had even been interviewed by one of our industry experts and called out for being a visionary in the social media work we were doing, but none of that mattered in the end.
I sat in meetings and watched the marketing director take credit for stuff he didn’t do and tear people down behind the scenes. Other people had meetings with the CEO and reported lies and deceit that had been carried on by the marketing director, but they always seemed to fall on deaf ears.
So really…what DID I learn? Well, I waited and waited and waited for the CEO to call me up and tell me that the marketing director had been discovered to be a manipulative liar. I hoped that my reputation would be restored. I longed for the day that one man wouldn’t have so much sway on the CEO. I hoped for an apology. I expected an apology. I deserved an apology.
But that apology has never come. One day a wise man came to our office and led a staff meeting. He talked about forgiveness and apologies. He said that we need to realize that forgiveness doesn’t come when someone asks for it. He said that it is up to each of us to grant forgiveness and that is not dependent on whether or not the offending party has asked for it. The truth is, he said, that the offending party may not even know they have offended. How will they ever ask for forgiveness if they don’t even think they’ve done anything wrong?
Wise words indeed.
I don’t know that I’ve truly forgiven the marketing director for his lies and the damage he caused. Some days I think I have. Other days, like this one, when I sit and think about it for a while, I tense up, I replay those meetings over and over in my mind, and I get angry all over again. Is it possible to forgive and still get angry about it? I doubt it.
But I have learned this for sure. I can’t dwell on it. When I find myself dwelling on it, I force myself to change my train of thought. I have to move on in my mind. I have to let it go. I’ve learned that I have to continuously choose to let it go, live in the present, and refuse to give power or authority to those who have harmed me.
I’m Darrell Darnell, and this has been Stuff I Learned Yesterday.
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