Charles (Chuck) Kensinger

That is an excellent question, isn’t it? Another difficult question is, “Do you cause people to stay or leave?” I have worked with both types of managers and fellow employees. In over forty years in business, I have seen managers chase away employees and customers.

One manager asked why I spent over thirty minutes dealing with one man that she referred to as “some farmer”. When I informed her that he was the maintenance foreman at one of our best customers she turned around and walked away. I saw another man throw a tray of food across the kitchen at a fast-food restaurant where I worked. He was the top manager at the company.

Salesmen that I know often tell their customers to ask for certain inside people that they know will give the customer the best service. Most people will wait for associates that take care of them. Time and again I see employees treat those who pay their salaries with disdain and rudeness.

The adage that “the customer is always right” has been changed to “Who do they think they are?”  If you have experienced any of these individuals, I hope that you contact management to make sure that they know what is happening in their businesses.

Sometimes management is a problem. Those in charge of a certain location may not correct employees because they do not care how they treat others. There are times when the best employees at a company leave these poorly managed organizations to join a manager that they have worked with before.

“The Peter Principle” by Laurence J. Peter and Raymund Hull was published in 1969 and made many of us aware of what companies often do. They promote good employees into supervisory or management positions where they eventually will fail. Not everyone who receives a new job at their current company is ineffective. Just a few.

I know employees who were truck drivers or warehousemen and became managers, salesmen, and executives who retired with coworkers praising them. I have also watched as these men and women were terminated because they could not accomplish their new tasks.

I have quit some jobs because of the managers I worked for. I have stayed at companies despite how the bosses treated me. I spent twenty years with a manager who chased off more good employees than I could count. I was the second in command. On several occasions, I was the one who made the decision that someone needed to be fired and was told that I would get to deliver the bad news.

I spent six years as an operations manager. With this company, an operations manager was normally a branch manager who was waiting to be transferred to another position or branch. In my case, they needed someone to run the branch while they dragged their feet and passed me over for the job.

When they gave the position to someone else, I found another job and moved back into purchasing where I was when I joined that company. I retired fifteen years later as a purchasing manager after working my way through three manufacturers that had all been customers for the previous twenty-five years.

Where is your career taking you? Do you enjoy what you do? Do not rule out moving to a new company or a new career. My experience in sales and management made me more effective in purchasing. You may want to change the sides of the desk like I did. Be willing to be flexible. Don’t forget to do something that you enjoy.

©Copyright 2024 by Charles Kensinger