Barking at the Staff

There are leaders who are out of touch, and there are Leaders who fully understand the misery their $13/hour staff suffer through.

So, last week I drop my wife off at the airport ... in my pickleball clothing ... and before playing I need to fill my belly with "something" (because it would be 100 degrees by 9:00am) ... something that is within a tenth of a mile of a freeway exit.

That something? McDonalds ... two breakfast burritos and a small orange juice for (checks notes) $7.70.

Yeah, whoa. That's a lotta inflation, peeps. Or a lot of profit. Or both.

And I suppose a fusion of inflation and an addiction to Cable News yields somebody who feels like this when things go sideways.

On this voyage into McDonalds last week, the angry cable news addicted customer walked in to the McDonalds in what appeared to be pajamas, asked for order number 443, then went off on a tirade for the ages because the 16 year old behind the cash register couldn't hand-deliver the order to her car. Even if the customer was right, the customer burned through her moral high ground within ten seconds of demeaning behavior targeted at somebody 55 years her junior.

It wasn't exactly Christian behavior on behalf of the customer. She didn't love her neighbor.

It was awful. De-humanizing. Cruel.

When the woman returned to her car to eat her disk-shaped hash brown, the customers inside the store consoled the young lady who was made to feel like a worthless human being.

If you are an Executive, how much time do you spend with your customer service staff, call center staff, or anybody who is public facing? Do you spend any time with them, or do you "outsource" all of that grief and soul-sucking activity to people you couldn't care less about and pay them $13 an hour to suffer on your behalf? Do you outsource it to a poor person in Topeka? Somebody in Singapore?

Or do you try to understand what these poor souls deal with?

When I worked at Eddie Bauer in the late 1990s, there was no requirement to understand the pure misery associated with call center work. This shouldn't surprise anybody, because the parent company (Spiegel) placed Executives on a separate floor in a tower in Chicago ... that floor had floors that were heated. Because if you are making $500,000 a year in 1997 dollars, you need a heated floor to perform better, am I right?

Heated floors.

When I worked at Nordstrom, we flew to Cedar Rapids many times to partner with call center and distribution center staff. When we shut down the catalog, angry customers in North Dakota were re-directed from the call center to me. I listened. I explained. The buck stopped with me. And other executives. And the Nordstrom family. We all took the calls.

Spend some time today trying to understand just how cruel your customers might be toward your staff. Your staff doesn't deserve the cruelty they absorb. Is there something you can do to help them?