6 min read · The Pillars I Stand On
I turned the corner into the stockroom and they scattered.
All four of them. Fast. The way people move when they’ve been caught doing something and they know it. I watched them go and then I looked down at what they’d left behind. A large empty cardboard box on the floor, top flaps open. And on one of them, a cartoon.
The ears. The centerpiece, a hand-drawn cartoon in a black and white striped shirt, jet black hair, and bushy eyebrows, surrounded by everything they’d heard me say. My name at the top. There was no getting around it.
This was me.
REPLACE YOUR DISPLAYS
WHO’S DRAGS ARE THESE
PUT AWAY THOSE SINGLES!
SPREAD OUT!
DONT FORgET To SIgN THE ScHEDULE!!
TAKE YOUR BREAK
HEY, YOUR “LATE”!!!
GET TO WORK!
I’M NOT PAYING YOU TO STAND AROUND!
I laughed. You have to. You’re standing there while four people watch your face from the sales floor doorway waiting to see what happens next. So I laughed, and the tension broke, and everyone went back to work.
Then I broke down the box and put it next to the trash.
I told myself that was the end of it.
· · ·
It wasn’t.
I walked back out to the sales floor and something in me went quiet. That was not normal for me at 21. I was energetic. I was loud. I was the kind of person other people fed off of. I’d followed my manager from the last store when he got promoted. He’d seen something in me, brought me with him, handed me a title in a city that was harder than anything I’d grown up in.
Sacramento wasn’t home. Back home you said hello and people said hello back. Here you might say hello and get nothing. The edges were sharper. The room was different. I wasn’t arrogant. I was just trying to prove I belonged.
And the only model I had for how a manager was supposed to sound was the one I’d watched for years, direct, loud when it needed to be, moving people, keeping the floor tight. I took that and sharpened it. Added volume I didn’t need and a tone that didn’t belong to me or the room.
I’M NOT PAYING YOU TO STAND AROUND.
I wasn’t writing anyone any checks. But I’d heard it. So I said it. And I said the rest of it too, every catchphrase I’d absorbed, delivered with a sharp tone and too loud for someone in my new position. I hadn’t earned my place yet.
That cartoon was them telling me they saw right through me.
· · ·
I stood on the sales floor for about an hour. Quiet. Not spiraling, not devastated. Just off. Four people I was responsible for felt that way about me. They had felt it long enough to draw it, to pass the pen around, to add their handwriting to somebody else’s joke. That’s not a bad day. That’s a pattern and it was up to me to determine what I was going to do about it.
I didn’t bark out any orders that afternoon. I couldn’t. Every phrase I’d been using now carried the cartoon with it. Even if nobody was laughing out loud, I knew what they were thinking inside. The words had lost their weight. They’d lost it the moment I saw what those words looked like coming out of me.
Then I went back to the trash pile.
I don’t know why I felt pulled to go back. I just knew it wasn’t fully resolved. I snuck back, found the box I’d broken down, and quickly cut out the cartoon. That night it rode home in the passenger seat like it was going to explain itself to me. When I got home I didn’t show my parents. Didn’t call my manager. I sat on my bed and stared at it for what seemed like hours, waiting for it to talk.
I was 21 years old and I didn’t know how to fix what I’d broken. There was no internet to search. No leadership book I was reaching for. I hadn’t done anything my managers hadn’t done before me. The difference was they’d earned the right to sound that way. I was an outsider with a title and a borrowed tone and four guys who saw right through it.
I changed my approach because I had no other choice. Not all at once. Not with a plan. I just stopped doing the thing that had no weight anymore and started finding out what did. Hey fellas, let’s get this place cleaned up before the next rush. Who sold the last display? Yo, did you sign the schedule yet?
Different words. Different posture. One group trying to do a job instead of one person trying to sound like a manager.
I don’t know if they noticed. I don’t know what they thought of any of it. Maybe it was boys being boys and they forgot about it by the weekend.
All I know is, that moment in time changed me forever. It made me more aware.
What I didn’t understand yet was that every room has its own ecosystem. You don’t walk in and change it. You read it first. Four guys and some ink on a cardboard box taught me that.
· · ·
Thank you, Fellas.
· · ·
I knew even then that I was going to have an office someday. I kept the cartoon because I understood, even at 21, that this was one of those moments. The kind that doesn’t announce itself as important while it’s happening but that you carry anyway because something in you knows. That piece of cardboard was the proof it happened. The single object from that moment that changed something in me before I fully understood what it was changing.
It’s been thirty years. It still sits in a frame where I can see it. When I see it, I reread their comments and smile. I’m grateful I learned this lesson early in my career and that it is no longer who I am.
· · ·
When you walk into a room with authority you haven’t earned yet, and most of us have, at some point, what does your version of that box look like?
You might already know. It might be a conversation you can’t stop replaying. A reaction you didn’t expect. A room that went quiet in a way that stayed with you on the drive home.
The question isn’t whether you’ve had the moment.
The question is whether you went back for it.