What about Bob?

I was 16. Life was great. It was time to get my first job. "Learning Express, that local toy store is hiring," my friend's mom told me. I decided to apply and was ecstatic when they hired me on the spot. Then life became a lot less tolerable. My example of misalignment occur ed within the walls of what some may have thought to be an innocent little toy store. Only four years later that toy store closed. I think I know what part of the reason was. We'll just call him Bob.

Bob was the owner of Learning Express. My first day on the job I was told exactly what the shared values of the company and specifically the little branch were. "We are a company that focuses on pleasing our customer. We want the customer to have a good in store experience and to feel the joy that comes from toys. We want the adults to feel the excitement of childhood as they look at these toys. Our culture is based on these goals. We want a fun, relaxed, family oriented culture, but also a culture focused on meeting goals and working hard. We want a workforce filled with self-motivated people who are driven to help the customer," Bob said to me. That sounded reasonable enough to me. I thought what could be more fun than working in a toy store. I love people so I thought focusing on people and making them happy would be easy enough. What I didn't realize was that nothing in the company aligned with these "shared values".

My first day as a cashier I realized that the structure of the company was completely unsupportive of the shared values. Being a company that supposedly allowed for an entrepreneurial and self-motivated spirit, the structure surprised me. We were given assignments based on how much in sales we did. If you didn't sale as much as another person you were on bathroom cleaning duty... or trash duty... or you had to stock the backroom. We were not paid by commission, but this unspoken culture caused a competitive, yet unhealthy culture in the store. Also, our store owner was incredibly degrading and insulting towards our team, and often times in front of the customers. He was incapable of leading our team because he didn't communicate with us. He never listened to our input and treated us as inferior. His style did not match the shared values of the company.

His friend was the store manager. She was completely unqualified and normally sat in the corner texting on her phone or in the back room talking to her boyfriend. The staffing was all wrong. There was also no clear strategy that was communicated to our team. It made it difficult to meet expectations and to be motivated to meet company goals.

Also, there were so many intricate procedures required for each transaction and being expected to complete them quickly made error very high. The systems the company had implemented were constraining and did not focus on the customer. Often times the misalignment of the company was so clear to a customer that they would leave without finishing their purchases. Maybe Bob wasn't the reason for the company's failure, but the misalignment that he certainly contributed to and didn't see a need to fix, most certainly was what closed the doors on that little toy store called Learning Express.