Elizabeth Sosnow: What I Learned From Getting Fired

This story is from Elizabeth Sosnow, Managing Director of BlissPR, and was first published in the BlissPR blog.

In this story, she recounts early lessons from getting fired from a summer job, and picking up a new one. [Elizabeth's dad is John Bliss, who has contributed several stories to this site.] Thanks to Elizabeth for allowing us to reprint it here.



What I Learned from Getting Fired…or, How to Start Becoming a Boss

I was fired once.

I was seventeen years old, working for a gift store in my home town. My job was to be a “jack of all trades,” from running errands to wrapping gifts to encouraging customers to make a purchase. I was speedy at errands, terrible at gift wrapping and mediocre at sales.

Meanwhile, my employer was running out of money, dodging creditors and avoiding invoices. My job began to include answering angry calls while she hid. Looking back, I can see that my boss had no time to be kind to a teenager…her professional life was falling apart.

My one bright spot that summer? My daily walk to buy a sandwich at the deli across the street. The owners were unfailingly kind to me, with a friendly hello or a warm word.

The busiest day of the summer arrived – the annual “sidewalk sale” where retailers unloaded their old inventory for low prices. My boss had me running for 12 hours straight. My high point was selling a pair of very expensive cubic zirconia earrings during the rush – my biggest sale ever.

But when the hordes cleared, she pulled me into her office and fired me on the spot. I was devastated.

After taking the weekend to lick my wounds, I realized I wanted to say goodbye to the deli owners. Somehow, they had become my friends. I just couldn’t disappear without a word, even though I was ashamed to tell them what had happened. I knew I wasn’t blameless – there are always two people involved.

I walked in to the deli, admitted what had happened…and they offered me a job on the spot. Not only that, it was at a higher salary for a shorter work day. They told me they’d always liked me, and they knew I wouldn’t let them down. I was stunned.
I worked at the deli for two summers and loved every minute. Honestly, I probably did let them down sometimes, but I’m also pretty sure they didn’t regret the job offer.
They taught me a little lesson on how to be a good employer virtually every day, including:

Set Fair Boundaries – and Stick to Them: How about the week that I strolled in 15 minutes late for four days in a row? They simply smiled and docked my pay for an hour. I was never late again.

Pay Attention to Individual Needs: The deli wasn’t always a hot bed of creativity. It was my job to draw up the “daily sandwich specials” sheet. Every day, I got more elaborate with it — more doodles, more colors, etc. They weren’t annoyed. Instead, they were patient…and only drew the line when my masterpieces started to consume more than 20 minutes of time.

You Need to Understand Who an Employee “Is,” While They Figure Out “Who They will Be:” One young male customer became increasingly interested in me. After one date, I knew he wasn’t for me. But he kept coming into the deli and I didn’t know how to handle the aggressive attention. Instead of being irritated with me, they let me hide in the back of the store one day, even though it left them short-handed up front. Maturity takes time, and people don’t “grow up” all at once, even in a terrific work environment.

Helped Me Begin to Understand Responsibility for Others: The deli had a number of refrigerated cases to hold all of the cold cuts, cheese and salads. During my second summer, I was promoted to “Manager” of the other summer employees. One of my responsibilities was to make sure that all of the doors to the cases stayed firmly shut, so the cold air stayed inside and the food stayed fresh. Well…the doors were sticky and didn’t slide shut easily. After warning me to keep an eye on it several times, my boss calmly started docking me (and only me) a quarter every time he found the door open. Simply put, I earned a higher wage than the others and therefore more was expected of me. End of story.

Now that I’m a boss myself, I try to remember the lessons that all three of those folks taught me that summer. Perhaps, in the end, it boils down to each of us understanding that the employer-employee relationship is a very much a two-way street.

What about you? What have you learned from a boss or an employee in the past? What kind of advice would you offer to a seventeen year old just starting out in the workforce?

From "Better Under Pressure," Jeremy's Story: Lacking a sense of agency

Another great story from Better Under Pressure: How Great Leaders Bring Out the Best in Themselves and Others. This one is about "Jeremy," a high potential executive who was struggling in a stretch role. Menkes uses the term "sense of agency" to describe taking personal accountability and responsibility for issues. He defines it in the book this way:

Sense of agency...refers to the degree to which people attribute their circumstances and the outcomes they experience to being within their own control.

This would be the opposite approach of the villain Tom Chaney (previously discussed in this post) in "True Grit," whose catchphrase is, "Everything is against me."

Here's Jeremy's story:

Jeremy was being groomed for possible promotion to the CEO role. His past success in commercializing products and executing their successful launch had dramatically raised his profile in the company. He had come to be seen as a possible successor to the CEO, and to further stretch him, the company placed him in charge of one of its underperforming divisions. When I met Jeremy, he had been in this new role for two years, and for the first time in his career, he was struggling to delivery. Many around the company had begun to question whether Jeremy had been promoted over his head, and he was feeling tremendous mounting pressure to show dramatic improvements in the division soon or be replaced.

.... An in-depth look at his track record, feedback from colleagues, and direct interviews with Jeremy himself revealed that his exceptional marketing talents and intense professional drive had led to an extraordinary level of success very early. But when he had been given a leadership position of dramatically increased scope, his tenure became marked with missteps. This is very normal, as leaders adjusting to a significant increase in responsibility invariably make many mistakes. Those who ultimately excel recognize and own these missteps quickly and use the experiences to grow into their positions of elevated authority and increased complexity. But for this learning curve to occur, it is absolutely crucial that they accept their role in these mistakes. If they have a low sense of agency, they cannot, and will fail.

As I got to know Jeremy, it became clear that the exceptional qualities that led to his raid ascent in the compnay were indeed impressive. He had a keen sense of market conditions and consumer needs and a knack for connecting the dots in a way that revealed dramatic new market opportunities. These high-profile successes earned him an expansive, well-deserved reputation in the compnay. But thus far, he had been thriving within divisions that already had well-established world-cleass operations in place. In Jeremy's new position, he was being asked for the first time to turn a failing team into a strong one. It was an essential test if he was going to be a serious candidate for CEO, and it was one that exposed Jeremy's Achilles heel. 

When I asked Jeremy why he had missed his units's earning targets every quarter for two years, he immediately deflected responsibility for this critical problem. "This place was a mess when I got here," he said. "I'm doing everything possible to get this thing turned around quickly, but the people here expect miracles. I need more time." Jeremy went on to say he felt he was being judged unfairly by colleagues, that people saw him as a threat and were just waiting for him to fail. "They need to help make me successful, not criticize." 

When pushed, Jeremy acknowledged that at least some of his colleagues seemed sincere in wanting him to be successful. But he still blamed his incompetent team for most of the problem. He fired some of those people, but then he found their replacements - people whom he had hired himself - "incompetent" as well.... 

Jeremy laid the blame for his division's poor performance on others - even those he himself had fired - showing a very low sense of agency, which is what I explained to him in our feedback session. Until he was able to take ownership of his situation and the central role he played in bringing it about, I told him, he was never going to gain from the critical learning opportunity that had been handed to him with this job. No one was expecting him to flawlessly turn around a situation that was indeed challenging, but Jeremy's problem was that he was showing no upward trajectory that could give his colleagues the confidence that he was learning from his mistakes and growing into the job.

pp. 91-93

Excerpted from "Better Under Pressure: How Great Leaders Bring Out the Best in Themselves and Others" by Justin Menkes. (c) 2011 Esaress Holding, Limited.