I was reading this fairly old article from a newspaper that caught my attention. Basically, it was talking about how there are tons of articles and advice on what you need to do to become successful in being self employed, but rarely does anyone talk about how once you get adapted and accustomed to making your own decisions and essentially calling all of the shots that you can ever go back. Therefore, if an entrepreneur ever tries to work as a regular employee again for whatever reason that they won’t last very long since they are accustomed to making say quick decisions on their own and being a risk taker.
I took such an interest in the article because I actually did this once before for fun and experience. Boy was it an interesting one I must say. At first I basically just wanted to have fun and I worked with everyone just fine. I must say though, at various times it drove me crazy to see decisions or directions being made that didn’t seem to be the best way to maximize profits or how people’s skills weren’t being fully utilized to make the best experience for the customers. I couldn’t help but to take initiative which ended up working better in everyway.
The real interesting part was when word started to get around that I wasn’t working there for money and it eventually became common knowledge that I was there for fun and experience. Here was the interesting part in terms of how my entrepreneurial mindset became a positive for one group and a negative for the other. The first management team, keep in mind this is a large company, embraced the fact that I had all of this experience and work ethic and tried to utilize it to its full ability by allowing me to make decisions that would help the store to become successful.
I guess you can say even though I didn’t have the title of say a manager that they had no doubts in trusting me with things that normally a regular employee cannot even go near. There was one example where we were kind of competing against a lot of other stores in terms of sales numbers for a particular category and I helped to lead them to victory where we came out ahead of everyone by a very ridiculous number that was something like 2 times the amount of all the other stores combined while showing a 3000% growth from the previous year. Literally, virtually every obstacle that came up I proved that it could be done when others said that it couldn’t and sure enough it was completed with success.
Now fast forward to when a different management team came in. Instead of embracing my skills and background, they took it as a sort of threat to their own job and wanted to limit my contribution as much as possible while undermining my accomplishments. At the same time, they feared that I could leave at anytime and so they would rather not risk having to rely on me in anyway. On top of that, this group in particular seemed to be selfless in terms of focusing more on profits than people and tried to do things such as not pay people overtime when they should have (I really cared for everyone’s well being too).
For this, my personality and work ethic created a lot of conflicts with the higher ups as I wasn’t afraid to address problems as they came up. The other employees seemed to have appreciated it while it created a headache for the people who were officially in charge. Overall, the store did worst as they persisted in continuing with their ways and to them I became an extreme challenge for them.
So from my little experiment and experience, the question about being able to adapt into say a regular employee environment has more to do with how effective the person is in trying to lead you. At the same time, if you are hiring someone with say that type of background and experience that you have to be prepared to be on the same level in terms of worth ethic and commitment to be the best as well.
It personally taught me a lot in terms of leadership too and re-affirmed my belief in taking care of people first in a work environment. Overall, it can work if the person is provided with the right responsibilities and direction. I must say though, at least it was fun overall and I got to meet a lot of new people.