Pep-Talks and Mental Breakdowns: On Leadership and Personality

     As of May this year, I’ve been in the meat business for eleven years.  During that tour of duty, I’ve worked for many different Market Managers and Meat Specialists, all with a wide range of personalities, pet-peeves, leadership styles, varying degrees of work ethic, narcissism, mental disorders, and vacillating levels of substance abuse and alcoholism.  What pleased one greatly annoyed the next.  I learned many lessons as to what makes a leader not only successful, but also respected and admired.  I also learned a lot about what makes a poor leader and an overwhelmingly shitty boss—those who demoralize and belittle as opposed to inspire; those who betray loyalty and dedication for grandiose and selfish ladder climbing schemes.

    Here’s the lot of them and what they meant to who I would become.  And an introspective analysis of the part of myself that I brought with me on the path, along with and despite the lessons learned from all of those who brought me up.

DANA:

    My first Market Manager while I apprenticed at Bi-Lo in Myrtle Beach at the age of 25, was a white-haired man in his late fifty’s or early sixties.  I think his name was Dana.  He did not know a damn thing about cutting meat other than wielding a newly-acquainted understanding of what cuts came from each primal.  Despite his lackluster knowledge of butchery, he was widely renowned as the BEST Market Manager in the district.  He had the best numbers.  What he lacked in the simple ability to put knife to flesh, he earned back in his keen sense of business understanding and organization.

    Dana began his career as a salesman pushing large tubs of some substance—paint, motor oil, whale sperm (I forget).  At first he didn’t do so well.  The large tubs were a hard sell so he became creative and repackaged them into smaller containers and sold them for a higher markup.  Suddenly he was the top salesman in the company.  He applied this ingenuity to his work when he came to the grocery business late in life.  Becoming a Deli Manager of a previously failing department, in short time he cut loose the sorry ends and increased sales and diminished shrink to a point that he impressed the big bosses.  The market in that store was on the down and out so they elected Dana to fix their problem.  He turned that around too.

    He ordered tight and we never had a heavy cooler for us much business as we did during the summer tourist season.  He relied on his employees to take care of the cutting aspect and focused predominantly on ordering, keeping a close eye on short-dated product by reducing and otherwise eliminating waste, personally running the trucks and downstacking the cooler so he knew exactly what product he had at all times.  The department ran smoothly.  He was mild-mannered but attentive to detail.  When he caught me cutting the tails off ribeyes, he calmly corrected me.  “Don’t throw away money.”

    David, my trainer, was his second-in-command, despite there being an Assistant present.  He and David did everything together.  So together, each did relatively little in the grand scheme or what is necessary to run a market.  After I was transferred back to my home store, David later came to be my Market Manager.  With David gone, Dana struggled.  What little physical work he was accustomed to doing in a day was amplified by David’s absence.  He turned to other employees to fill in the gap.  To which they replied “I’m not doing YOUR job for you!”

    For everything Dana was, he was not a meat-cutter.  And he didn’t last long after David left.  He quickly burned out and grew overwhelmed, taking an early retirement to distance himself from failure at the end of an otherwise flawless career.

BOSSMAN JOE:

    When I left training to return to my home store, everyone grew concerned about me.  I was going to work for Joe.  He was in his early 30’s, a brand new Market Manager, and everyone knew him by his reputation as a hot-headed alcoholic.  I remember Freddy asking who the Market Manager was down there, and when informed, replied “YOU MEAN JOE, THE DRUNK!?”

    By the time I arrived back at my old store, Joe was sober as a nun in mass.  He smoked cigarettes but never touched an ounce of liquor, probably court ordered, after his latest DUI charge.  By all means, still hot-headed, he caught me scraping the bone-dust off of both sides of the pork chops I cut on the saw and just absolutely lost his shit.  “We don’t have time for that!  Did no one teach you the ‘right way!?’”  He screamed.  He instructed me to arrange the pork chops in the tray then simply scrape the obvious bone dust from the visible pieces and push it to the wrapping machine.  We had shit to do and nothing was going to slow us down.

    Everyone in the market hated him.  Going so far as to each and everyone calling out one day so he had to run the place by himself.  Joe was paranoid, and probably rightfully so, accusing his Second, among others, of setting him up for failure.  But Joe was always fair with me.  He took me under his wing.  When he didn’t have enough hours, he would call around to different stores asking if they needed help so I wouldn’t go home with a sorry paycheck that week.  I floated from store to store as a hired knife, especially in the winter when the only business we had came from old “Snowbirds” on a budget.  

    Pretty soon I was his sole confidant, the only person to tolerate him.  We became buddies.  My roommates and I would meet him out at the bar and he bought me drinks while he sipped on non-alcoholic beers.  I sold him weed.  He taught me how to cut corners when in a pinch and finally broke me of my overwhelming fear of the bandsaw.  He cut fast but not pretty.  Always angry and red in the face, tracking his emotional outbursts was like watching a bouncy ball flung headlong into a room—hitting the floor, then the ceiling, bouncing off windows and doors until it came to a sudden and abrupt halt of absolute rock-bottom despair, face planted into open palms in the cooler floor.  Obviously bi-polar, he went from extreme bouts of self-confidence to downward spirals of absolute depression.  But deep down, he was a good guy.  He meant well.  I liked Joe.

    As a manager, despite not being able to acquire loyalty or respect from anyone other than myself and my roommate, he lacked essential business acumen.  He ordered and ordered and ordered until we had so much product sitting in the cooler, hopelessly waiting for a customer’s buggy, all of which never even met the saw or knife and just rotted in the case.  I don’t remember how much we threw away.  And our store took turns scoring in either the top or second in the company for sales between Memorial weekend and Labor Day.  So there’s was a large margin for error, but he just dove right over the edge.  We had mounds of product that went out of date and hit the trash compactor.  After another bad inventory, I was the one who answered the phone call from the Meat Specialist, Donny.  

    Donny stuttered.  Later, when I ran the market, we used to count the stutters during conference calls and place bets.  To this day, I’m pretty sure I’m owed a few free drinks.  

    “Did uh…uh…uh…Joe…uh…over…uh…compensate or…uh…under-compensate for anything…for uh…his inventory?  His…uh…shrink…uh…is at a 24%.”

    The fuck did I know?  I’d been cutting meat for less than a year.  I didn’t know anything about shrink or gross profit or sales-to-purchases.  I was the last man in the market.  I fed Donny some bullshit and then told Joe.  The store manager called Joe in the office and chewed him out.

    Joe quit a few weeks later, landing a job as both a meat-cutter and a cook for Texas Roadhouse.  That didn’t last long, but it turned out well for him.  He had been dating one of the salaried managers at Bi-Lo secretly and now he could finally be open about it.  That didn’t last long either.  But at his new job he met his future wife and found happiness.  Bully for Joe, he was Hell on retreat!

    Joe’s arrogance exceeded his confidence.  He was easily flustered and couldn’t read his market.  He couldn’t predict sales and overcompensated.  I would see this again.  Plus, he wasn’t good with people and his people fucked him.  No one wants to work for a manager that’s screaming all the time.  He screamed at me.  But I was just like “that’s just Joe.”  I saw beneath it all.  To the point I told someone “I like to make Joe mad, I think it’s funny.”  They told Joe.  He confronted me.  “SO YOU THINK IT’S FUNNY WHEN YOU MAKE ME MAD!”  I did.  And I laughed hysterically.  The next one to come was David.

DAVID:

    David was the first one I met as a trainee.  We exchanged geographical locations as to where we were from in West Virginia and discussed the punk rock shows we’d seen.  When he was younger, he was a drummer in a punk band.  On his leg he sported “LBC” tattooed in black ink.  “Lower Boone County,” he explained.  “Where we’re all lower class.”  He was early thirties with a wife and three kids.  He bullshitted his way into meat-cutting.  When he left West Virginia, he got a job at the IGA in North Myrtle after about 6 months of previous cutting experience.  When they asked him to cut something, he simply replied “show me how you do it here.”  Then he replicated that having no prior knowledge of that cut.  He had an amiable personality.  And was promoted to Market Manager after Joe quit.  

    He was lazy.  He always told me “it’s not what you can do, it’s what you know.”  That worked well enough for the big bosses, but it didn’t work well for me.  He spent all day working one float of lunchmeat while I had to cut beef and pork and wrap and fill the counter.  He liked to talk.  So he spent his day doing that, while making more money than me and getting all the recognition for my hard work.  One day I asked if I could go out and smoke a cigarette.  He asked “is the case full?”  Not yet, but I’ve been here for four hours.  He hadn’t even finished his float of lunchmeat.  I grew bitter.  One day I cussed him out.

    I had just clocked out and arrived home.  I chugged a beer.  My store manager called me to come back to work because we suddenly became busy.  I walked in to catch David sitting on an empty box of meat, not doing a damn thing.  I cussed him out.  He later apologized but went back to doing the same thing.  This was my career, my lifeblood for rent and expenses.  This was how I put food on my table and paid student loans.  I was angry.

    The things I learned from David were things not to do.  We had something like 10 cases of out-of-date chicken, probably gone for a week.  I asked him what he was going to do with it.  “Slap a new date on it and put it in the counter.  Hell, I’m not the one eating it!”  

    When he left and I was the one running the department until they found someone with more skill and experience, so I asked him what advice he had for me.

    “In seafood, if you lean against the counter, it takes the weight off your lower back.”

    David coveted the title and the pay increase, but he didn’t want to work.  He left all the work up to me and then bragged about our sales and low shrink.  He did get me promoted to Assistant Market Manager, and he taught me a lot about running a market and cutting meat, so he had a good thing or two going for him at least.

        BUTCH:

    I was 1.5 years into my meat cutting career and suddenly running a market.  Working around 67 hours a week, I earned enough from my overtime to save up to buy my first car.  My knife case continued to expand with brand new slicing knives, scimitars, and boning blades.  I smoked brand name cigarettes and drank good beer…when I had free time, which was rare.  But the whole market was a mess.  We had a meat-cutter, fresh out of training, who had cut just as long as me, but he was slow and full of drama—always showing up late, calling out, or leaving early for some stupid fucking “reason” or another.  One time he was no-call/no-show for a week.  Then suddenly he appeared one day, explaining he had been in jail.

    As an assistant, I could not write him up.  And the store manager did nothing when I brought the issue to his attention.  We had another kid, 18 years old, who I took under my wing and taught him to cut meat.  Needing a place to stay, he became one of my roommates.  Just the three of us, plus an alcoholic Seafood Manager and a part-time cleanup guy, each day was a struggle for a market that was either number one or number two in sales each week from May-September.

    I worked every day for the entirety of the summer, sometimes coming in at 5AM and working until midnight.  Or coming in at 5PM and working until 7AM the next morning to set the Ad for the weekly sales plan.  They promised me the market, but they kept fucking with my paycheck.  I’d work 20+ hours of overtime and they would pay me for a 40-hour week.  I threw a fit, cussed out the Co-Manager on the sales floor in front of customers, and made them pay me in cash for the difference after threatening to call my father and have all future conversations between the company and me held vicariously through his friend, a highly-renowned lawyer in the state of North Carolina.

    I also cussed out my store manager.  On my overnight shifts each week to set the Ad, I cut and wrapped all the meat we needed for the following day, re-weighed all the packages to reflect the sales ad, cleaned the market, and hung signs and tags.  I didn’t take a lunch, but stepped outside every two hours or so to smoke a cigarette for 5-10 minutes.  I clocked out each time so it was MY time I was on, not the company’s.  

    My store manager said “All you do all night is smoke cigarettes.”

    “The fuck did you just say to me!?” I screamed.

    He began to shake.  No one had ever seen me angry, save for the Co-Manager.  The Deli Manager had a long-standing crush on me and poked her head in the door out of curiosity when she noticed the increasing level of my voice as she walked by the cutting room.  She mentioned to someone that she thought it would be hot to see me angry, as I was always joking and laughing and laid-back. 

    “I didn’t think Josh could get angry.” She explained to my coworkers.  “I’ve known him for YEARS!  But when I saw it, I couldn’t unsee it.  I never want to see it ever again.  Josh was scary!”

    My store manager apologized and made a quick exit.  Somehow I still had a job.  

    Finally I had a day off, so my roommate and I hit the bars.  We arrived home as the sun crested along the horizon and McDonalds refused to serve us chicken nuggets.  “Who the fuck serves breakfast at 6AM!?” I remember screaming into the speaker.  At 7:30AM, my store manager called me.  Keith, the other meat-cutter, had to leave—something about his kid—and I needed to come in.  I was still drunk from the night before when I arrived, full of rage, when I was taken aside and it explained to me that they were brining in a new Market Manager from Food Lion.

    “I don’t want to fucking work for you anyhow!” I yelled.

    “Don’t be like that.”

    “No, before I walked in this morning I was coming here to tell you I don’t want to run a market for you.  Fuck all that!”

    “You need to help this guy out.”

    “I will.  I have nothing against him.”

    I worked 12 hours as the hangover set in and I sobered up, popping amphetamines to stay awake and focused.

    Butch was a short and skinny man in his late-50’s or early 60’s.  His breath smelled like bourbon and stale cigarettes every morning.  He had his own butcher business for the vast majority of his career until everyone started shopping at the big box stores and he lost his business.  He was kind, couldn’t cut meat for shit; his cuts looked like an old-time washing board with all these ridges where he cut, stopped, readjusted the angle, then cut some more.  He left all the ordering and scheduling up to me.  Anything that involved a computer was my domain—emails, schedules, orders, shrink sheets, sales planners, markdowns.  I was still running the market, only his name was on it now.  And he didn’t do well when I wasn’t there.

    The district manager walked the store when I was off.  He sent out a nasty-gram about Butch.  “He STILL isn’t getting it!”  There was out-of-date chicken in the counter, things had not been marked down properly, etc.  I held no bitterness toward Butch for anything that had transpired.  I didn’t care I was the defacto Market Manager without the title or pay.  He was kind to me.  When I needed a day off for surgery or I wanted to go hunting, he worked from open-to-close to cover my absence.  He even let me take off Thanksgiving week to go shoot a deer in the Upstate and gave me off two days for my birthday.

    Word got back to me just how much Butch thought of me.

    Dexter, the Market Manager who worked my store when I was in Frozen Food, was in Socastee now.  They were all together at a district Market Manager’s meeting.  I ran into Dexter a few times a week at the ABC store next to work.  He and the owner drank after hours in the backroom every day.  Dexter liked schnapps.  I saw him there one day and he pulled me to the side.

    “Butch spoke very highly of you at the meeting.” He told me.  “He said there was no one in that department he could count on, but he had one gem among the rest: YOU.  He bragged on you and told everyone he didn’t learn anything from weeks of training, and that he almost lost his wife, but you were there to teach and guide him every step of the way.  He thinks a lot of you.”

    When the store manager was replaced with a new guy, that new guy immediately fired Keith.  Bi-lo bought out the Piggly Wiggly’s in town so we received an Assistant Market Manager from one of those stores.  Butch, him, and me—we got along well.  But my Store Manager didn’t like the fact that I was in school.  “We can’t have two Assistant Market Managers and it seems like you don’t plan on staying around long.”  So I was asked to step down, kept my pay, and Butch asked me to keep doing what I was doing.  Both of them were sore about my title demotion, but I didn’t care.  I set my sights on college and transferred back to the Upstate where I began all those years ago.

    Butch hugged me on my last day, thanking me for everything I had done for him.  While Butch may have had YEARS of experience, he was not cut out for the corporate world and all the new technology and spreadsheets and emails and reports.  I’m sure he could run a market, but the entire time I was there, I did the lot of that.  It was good experience and Butch treated me like a son.  I will always think of him well.

    DAVID #2:

    I arrived back in the Upstate, hoping to return to college and finish my degree.  I transferred to a different Bi-Lo part-time.  That’s where I met David #2.  He was in his early 30’s with a wife and kids.  We instantly connected.  He was a lot like me—laid-back, soft-spoken, enjoyed hunting and fishing, and had a long history of alcohol and drug abuse (but had given all that up when he had his kid).  He worked around my school schedule and when one guy quit, asked if I wanted a full-time position again.  I agreed.  The Assistant Market Manager was shit, so David depended on me to keep things flowing.  I could do orders, print out reports, do markdowns; anything he needed done I could do.  

    David’s problem was that he was not a true manager.  He was too laid-back.  The Assistant would talk on his phone all day and after he got done cutting beef, would sit down and continue his phone conversations for the next 3-4 hours, not helping out anyone else or filling the counter.  This went unaddressed.  Plus, he was like Joe, and got too excited with his ordering.  I remember Corporate coming in and looking at our markdown report.

    “Y’all marked down 120 whole chickens yesterday?”

    “Yessir!”

    We had cases of pork loins we threw out.  The entirety of our counter consisted of markdown beef because the Assistant over-cut.  Pre-packaged ground beef went out of date sitting in the cooler.  The entire cooler had to either be thrown out or reduced.  And David never could get a handle on it.  The Assistant was at fault, too.  When the Assistant was off the next day, he would order heavy because he didn’t like me and one of the other cutters, John (because John was black and Tommy was a racist).  So we would have an already heavy cooler and have to downstack five pallets of things we didn’t need because Tommy was spiteful.  

    The whole store was poorly run and everyone together just ran it into the ground.  I left to move to North Carolina after my head injury.  The store closed down, as did eventually every Bi-Lo in the states.  David was good to me.  He reminded me a lot of myself and we were buddies.  But he was no manager.  He couldn’t order product or lead people.  He was too laid-back.

    I think well of David.  After I left, he texted me to come back.  Tommy got fired for snapping a photo of a customer leaning over the counter with her breast exposed.  He posted it to his Facebook and tagged Bi-lo in the caption “This is what we’ve got to deal with.”  I took him up on his offer, called the Store Manager who was more than happy to reinstate me.  But I asked for too much to be an Assistant Market Manager for cheap-ass Bi-Lo.  I wanted $16.50.  They told me I could come back and cut meat for $14.50.  I told them I couldn’t afford an apartment and student loans on that salary.  Looking forward, it was good I didn’t make that move.  They closed a year later.  I hope David is well and running a department with decent human beings instead of drunks, drug addicts, people hoping to get fired and live off of unemployment, and degenerates like me who sustain head injuries while at a bar on vacation.

    SCOTT:

    After being unemployed for a number of months following my head injury and getting CT scans, MRI’s, medication, multiple doctors with varying diagnoses, spending my 29th birthday on a 5-day stretch in the hospital, being stone-cold sober for 6 months and off all nicotine, I found a part-time job cutting meat at Food Lion.  That’s where I met Scott.

    He wasn’t there my first day.  And I was the closer.  Their level of sanitation was ridiculous.  I cleaned the entire department and had to be checked out by a manager.  They shined a flashlight on any gram of “protein” left on the saw and made me re-clean the wrapper because of fingerprints.  “Did you clean the ceiling?”  I thought this was a joke for the new guy.  “No, I didn’t use the ceiling today.  I cleaned the fans.”  I was instructed to clean the ceiling before I left.  I left almost two hours past my scheduled time.  We weren’t busy; I just had to spend 4 hours cleaning one saw, two butcher blocks, and a grinder.  One speck that only showed under a flashlight meant the entire saw was unclean.  

    I told my bossman the next day “Y’all really take sanitation seriously here, huh!?”

    He laid me out.

    “So YOU don’t take sanitation seriously?  Is that what it is?  We pride ourselves in…”  Blah, blah, blah.  Stroke it and shoot it and get it out of your system.  Fucking Jesus, what had I walked into!?

    When I applied for the job, they asked “do you have a problem with closing?”  I told them “no.”  At my last job we each took turns closing so we only closed one day a week, I told them.  I became the designated closer.  There were three people in the market, including Scott.  There was one person in the market at each given time except between the hours of 12PM and 2PM.  I was bored, I was lonely.  No one to talk to and shoot the shit with.  Scott was full of drama, which fortunately he did not bring me in on.  All the managers hated Scott.  I liked him.

    We never had to worry about an audit or a health department visit.  He was meticulous and overbearing.  Everything was perfect and the cooler looked like some renaissance painting of Jesus and peace, tranquility, and eternal salvation.  Scott wanted me to take over the department.  He wanted to move to Myrtle Beach with his wife and stepdaughter.  He had big plans for me, so he trained me how to order, work the automatic ordering system for lunchmeat and frozen, take inventory.  He had big plans.  I ruined them.

    The week before they went pre-packaged, I turned in my notice.  I texted Scott.  He called me.  We had a long conversation on my way to work.  He couldn’t talk me out of it.  I was talked to by my Store Manager.  “You don’t want to be just a meat-cutter forever, do you?”  He offered me the market.  I turned it down.  “I don’t want to lose my trade.” I told him.

    B.J.:

     I didn’t meet B.J. my first week at my new job.  I only new Archie.  He hurried me back to the meat department on my first day screaming “it ain’t at the front of the store!”  We worked from 7AM-7PM seven days a week.  I bough a new muzzleloader from my first paycheck.  Archie was old-school, a hard ass, and I didn’t like him when I first met him.  I met B.J. the following week after his vacation.  

    We opened at 7AM and it was B.J., a meat-wrapper, and me.  He spent four hours doing orders, not bothering to setup seafood, work the racks, or anything.  All that was left up to me, plus the cutting.  But soon our market expanded to include another meat cutter and a new wrapper after the last one walked out.  My job each day was to come in and cut beef for eight hours and go home.

    B.J. worked 60 hours a week, the only Market Manager in the company who was paid hourly and not on Chinese overtime where he earned less the more he worked.  He rarely cut meat, rarely managed, and simply made out orders and schedules and spent the rest of the day talking to customers he knew.  When people weren’t doing their job, he gossiped about them and their personal lives to his employees, but never corrected the issue.  He was in love with the title and the pay, but not the job.  He was by far the worst Market Manager I ever worked for.

    Our meat-wrapper rarely wrapped meat.  She spent the day talking to employees, customers, holding babies, calling out, etc.  When it came time for her shift to end, she left me and the other cutter with racks worth of wrapping to do before we could go home.  Moreover, when she wrapped a rack of meat, she pushed it to the back instead of filling the empty holes in the counter.  “I get paid to wrap, not work racks” she told me.  “Y’all need to stop cutting and do that.”  I went in on my day off to talk to B.J. about it.  He never addressed the situation and she kept on, calling out 2-3 times a week, and leaving us with her work to do on top of our jobs.  

    I talked back to B.J.  He asked me to do unethical things and I refused.  I was no one’s lacky.  B.J. hated me.  So much so that when I personally informed him I was taking a job as a Market Manager at a different store, he replied “Good.  That will help my labor budget.”  B.J. got fired about a year later.  They never cited cause or explained anything to him.  Just called him into the office and he was gone.  So much drama in that market, with the big bosses being called in to deal with situations he should have addressed.  Sales dropped, meanwhile he and the other meat cutter were making bank off of overtime with nothing to justify their living in the store.  The big corporate guys stopped by the store frequently, wondering where all that money was going when they weren’t putting sales back into the company pocket.

    I remember B.J. telling me “I’m not going to quit; they’re going to have to fire me!”  And that’s exactly what they did.

    ME…

    When I took my market, I had all of these guys floating around my head and deep in my heart.  I wanted to be a numbers guy like Dana, take care of my employees like Joe and Butch, and be nothing like David #1 or B.J.  Throughout my career I carried pieces of all of them with me and added my own quirks, positive and negative traits and habits, and went down my own path.  I’ll never forget those who took me under their wing and taught me valuable lessons—of what one should do, and what not to do.  These lessons will follow me for as long as I earn a paycheck with a saw and scimitar.  

    Most importantly, finally viewing things from the driver’s seat, I understood my former bosses more—I appreciated more of their qualities, their kindness, and sympathized with their faults and flaws.  At last my view wasn’t from the backseat second-guessing their judgement.  The weight was on my shoulders and I could see where one could falter at any given moment, where one can become anxious and over-order, cut corners, lose their temper, leave a situation unaddressed, and otherwise fail to live up to the expectations of those subordinate to you.  Everyone is a the perfect driver when they’re sitting in the backseat of a cab, until they climb behind the steering wheel and have to drive through iced-over roads in a blinding blizzard with a car full of people who’s lives are in their hands.