8 min read · The Pillars I Stand On
The stockroom was hot and dusty and smelled like cigarette smoke.
The shelves ran fifteen feet high. The aisles between them were thirty inches wide, enough to move but not enough to breathe easy, and by midday the broken down boxes and unboxed shipments had turned every aisle into an obstacle course. My job was to climb the ladder, fill the wall, no holes. Size by size, clean and tight.
This was the late eighties, early nineties. You could still smoke in malls and restaurants back then. The sneaker head was being invented and didn’t have a name yet. Jordan was happening. People cared about shoes in a way they never quite had before and the commissioned sales floor knew it.
There was one salesperson I will never forget. He had an ashtray sitting on one of the shelves just outside our small break room. Every time he came to the stockroom for shoes he’d pull his half smoked cigarette out of that ashtray, light it up, and take three or four drags while he searched the wall for the shoe and size he needed. On his way out he’d knock the cherry off carefully so he didn’t waste any of his precious cigarette and drop it back in his ashtray before heading to the floor. He always had a huge smile that never left his face and a triple shot coffee drink that was never far from his hand. He drummed his fingers on whatever box was nearby while he looked. Fueled by caffeine and cigarettes and fully dialed in his own element. I can still see him raising his eyebrows mid drag, as he looked at me staring at him, and that full lipped smile as the cigarette left his lips.
Pure bliss.
His name was Dave. Tall, lean, short dark hair swept to the right, and a love for seventies classic rock that never quite left his hands. The drumming on every box he touched made a lot more sense once you knew that about him. That and the caffeine. I shook my head and smiled every time I watched his routine. He was pure hustle and I wanted to be part of it. He also had a way of making me feel seen. He’d glance at the wall, nod, and tell me it looked great. A commissioned salesman with every reason to keep moving taking a second to affirm the stock kid on the ladder. He had no idea what that meant to me. He was the hustle I needed to witness and the encouragement I didn’t know I needed to hear.
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That store had an energy to it. You could feel it the moment you walked in. So I worked. I moved fast. I got the shipment broken down, checked off the manifest, up on the wall and then went looking for the next thing to do. Some of the other stock people milked it. Nobody watching meant you could stretch a two hour job into four. That wasn’t me. The older stock guys would give me the eye sometimes. You’re working too hard. You’re making the rest of us look bad. Slow down. I heard it. I ignored it. I wanted the sales floor and I wasn’t going to get there by milking it.
The way I saw it, the only way out of the stockroom was for it to be perfect. If I could present it clean and tight and free of obstacles as fast as possible then I was free to climb out of it. So that’s what I did.
I was building my own ladder before I even knew that’s what I needed to do.
I had been hired as seasonal Christmas help. A placeholder until the holiday rush was over. After the Christmas holiday I was the only stock person they kept.
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I didn’t know it at the time but I was picking something up I’d carry for the rest of my career. Not a skill. A memory. This wasn’t hard work. It was sweaty work. The kind of unglamorous work that doesn’t show up on a resume and doesn’t need to. The stockroom wasn’t even the first rung of the ladder. It was the ground beneath it. From my perspective, you see everything. Who hustles, who milks it, who notices the stock kid on the ladder and who walks right past. I know what that place feels like because I lived in it. That knowledge never left me.
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The higher you climb the easier it is to forget. Not because you become a bad person, but because the work starts to look different from far away. The details get soft. The people get abstract. The further you get from the work, the easier it is to look at a spreadsheet and feel like you understand what’s happening. The messiness of real people doing real work disappears. Everything looks orderly, even manageable. Somewhere in that abstraction the spreadsheet starts to gloss over the whole story and decisions that would have been unthinkable up close start to feel reasonable. Logical even.
I watched it happen more than once. A room full of managers, each running a team of twenty five people. The directive comes down from above: each of you needs to cut five. Not the bottom twenty across all four teams. Five each. Keep it fair.
Nobody asked the obvious question. Any one of those teams’ five worst might be better than half the people on another team. We weren’t cutting the bottom twenty. We were cutting five from each corner regardless of what those people were actually worth. It looked fair on paper. In practice we lost good people because the decision was made by someone too far from the work to know the difference.
That’s what distance does. It makes a bad decision look like a fair one.
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I never subscribed to sink or swim. I heard the argument plenty of times. That’s how I learned it. I survived. They’ll figure it out. What I knew underneath it was always the same thing. They might not have remembered, but I never forgot. Every time I heard that argument I wanted to ask a few questions. Did you like drowning? Did you enjoy that moment? Did you wish there was a better way? I’m guessing the answers were always no. Because if the answer is yes and you’re still putting people through it anyway, that’s not a philosophy. That’s just forgetting, mistaken for toughness.
Every time I had authority I built something different.
On the Google project we tore down a training program that was designed for people who already knew the work and rebuilt it for people who didn’t. We put fiber samples in their hands before we put them in front of a screen. We took them into the field so they could stand next to a manhole and a telephone pole and understand what they’d be putting to paper as their new job. We wanted to give them a raft.
On the FTTB project I inherited engineers with no relevant fiber experience and dropped them into the hardest territory in the region. I was angry about it. Not for me, for them. I needed experienced engineers and was told that’s how I learned it and they’d be fine. I built them a ladder anyway. Small jobs first, then moderate, then hard. You demonstrate competency at each level before you move to the next. Nobody gets thrown into the deep end to start.
None of that came from a book. It came from living in that stockroom as a teen and wanting to climb out of it and do more. From remembering what it felt like to be at the bottom looking up and deciding that if I ever had the ability to make that climb easier for someone else I was going to make it happen.
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Here’s what I’ve learned about leaders who forget.
It’s rarely intentional. Nobody wakes up and decides to stop caring about the people beneath them. What happens is slower than that. You get promoted. You get comfortable. Then you get stretched. The meetings multiply. The fires need putting out. The resources never quite match the ask. You’re pulled in every direction from the top and the people doing the actual work, the ones in the trenches, the cogs that make the whole thing turn, start to slip out of focus. Not because you stopped caring. Because the system stopped making space for it. You start managing the numbers because the numbers are what’s in front of you. One day you make a decision, five each, they’ll figure it out, I did. The churn becomes acceptable and it doesn’t even register as the thing it actually is.
Which is forgetting.
If you really want to know what’s going on, don’t look at a spreadsheet. Go have a conversation. Go stand where the work happens and ask those people what their day looks like. That’s where the truth lives. Not in an overpriced conference room.
The antidote isn’t a leadership philosophy. It’s a practice. Walk the floor. Visit the trenches. Remember the heat, the dust, and all of the obstacles. Dave wasn’t a manager. He was a commissioned salesman with a cigarette in one hand, a coffee in the other and a smile that never quit. He saw the stock kid on the ladder and told him the wall looked great. That’s it. That’s the whole thing.
The moment you forget what the bottom feels like is the moment you start making decisions that only make sense from the top.
Remember Dave.