Held Together

I was talking to a friend the other day who kept saying how disconnected everyone is at her company. Home office has no relationship with stores and store management has no relationship with the sales team. She told me that her job title should be “a frayed knot keeping it all together.”

I chuckled when she said this, but as I thought further about what she was actually saying, it got me thinking. How many of these types of employees are out there trying to make sense of unorganized organizations? I’m talking about those employees that will do whatever it takes to calm the storm; dot the i’s and cross the t’s. A person who is willing to sacrifice their own time and standing to right an organization’s course. 

Being the knot can’t be easy. Hierarchies be damned. If your peers or your boss don’t have the vision to see what’s happening, it may look like you’re not a team player or you don’t have patience in the process. Worse yet, people will get used to someone else finishing their projects. It will become routine and soon friction and strife between team members rears its ugly head.

I was sometimes called a rebel in my career. Not because I stood out and defied authority, but because I wasn’t afraid to challenge the system. I always had an eye for efficiency and pushing people in the direction of positive results, (although many didn’t see it that way). A rebel is defined as a person who resists any authority, control or tradition. I define it as someone who makes things happen without constraint to better the environment. 

When I think back on my early retail days, I guess I would now call myself a knot too. I worked with many different types of people from all walks of life. Many had their own agendas and thought no one was really paying attention to their moves and ambitions. I, for one, always saw the big picture and knew what had to be done despite the ass kissers and people pleasers. I dotted their I’s and crossed their t’s because I wanted the store to be successful and its employees to believe in something.

If leadership would have noticed what was being done, perhaps I would have moved up a lot faster as someone they could count on for results, but oftentimes, the knot gets put on the back burner because they are not seen as the driven one.  You see... knots don’t take credit for their work. Some would say that is stupid and because of it, I was passed up many times in my career. I was also put into positions training people with higher salaries and titles than myself and operational roles to clean up messes, it bothered me back then, but now I see what it did for me. It built my reputation and my resume. It pushed me to be a stronger version of myself. It forced me into playing defense and sticking to my belief that I could make a difference without putting my credibility into question. 

Don’t get me wrong, I struggled in the past watching mediocre managers move up ladders, but they proved to not last in their roles. Why? They never had the skillset to accomplish the roles they were promoted into.

They struggled to manage people. They struggled to manage their time. Now, one could say it was the fault of the knot holding everything together that they weren’t able to grow into position and manage their store, but I would like to add, if they were doing what they were hired to do, then the knot would have never existed.

As a person in a leadership role now, I look for the person that encompasses these characteristics because I know who they are to become in the future. Those characteristics take a defining role in my hiring decisions and should be yours too. We have enough ass kissers and people pleasers to last a life time. They are not going anywhere, but the rebel? Give them the opportunity to shine. Believe me, you will not regret it and your business will thank you for it.

How do you know when you have found one? Open your eyes on and off the sales floor! Hiring? Look at the candidates journey. Ask them questions about their responsibilities. Notice their body language when asked about their role on a team or what their supervisor may say about them. Is it a bit awkward? Don’t hold it against them. If the answers aren’t negative, you have a knot. Hire them.