Rediscovering Passion: My Transition from Corporate to Creative (Part Two of Two in the Management 101 Series)

For a few weeks, I revisited my favorite things about northern New Mexico, looking for the closure I needed in what made Santa Fe enchanting for me. Those last few weeks were pleasantly de-stressing. One afternoon while hiking one of the many trails up the mountain I got it in my head to return to my retail roots. Over the previous weeks, I had been thinking about Montana. I was being called upon. That evening, I opened my laptop, and typed “Barnes & Noble,” in the search engine, scrolled to the bottom of the page, clicked on Careers at B&N, then Retail Jobs, and then typed 59718 (Bozeman, Montana’s zip code). The Bozeman Barnes & Noble was looking to hire an assistant store manager.

Bozeman Barnes & Noble’s regional manager called me the next day. Throughout the next week and a half, I interviewed with a small handful of people and was subsequently offered the position. When the regional manager offered me the position, we discussed local expenses and my salary expectations. I explained to him that for the move to be worth it, and to afford to live in (or around) Bozeman, my salary would have to be at least $56,000. Verbal promises were made, we shared a long-distance handshake, and I accepted the job. I found a two-bedroom house in a small town twenty miles east of Bozeman, Montana, rented a U-Haul, packed my apartment, and drove cross-country.

I can’t express here how excited I was. I felt renewed, a budding opportunity for redemption. I felt like the years of actively building this career might now unfold and into a real living—finally. I was returning to my roots, and now as a manager, returning too with more experience and new resources. In the past, I had worked for Borders, Hastings, and Barnes & Noble in Murray, Utah, and New York City, New York, the latter I helped to open. The regional manager I had been speaking with was friends with the store manager I worked for at B&N 86^th & Lexington, and he was excited to have a member of that team working in Bozeman. All I could hope for now was to work with a good store manager. I had spoken to him twice over the phone and knew only of his previous management experience.

The store manager was new to the book industry. He had several years of store management experience working at Staples, TJ Maxx, and Circuit City. He’s a seasoned manager, and I was excited about that; the book industry is fairly specialized, and it helps, especially as a store manager, to be as familiar as possible with the few centuries of book titles and their authors can be a prerequisite for the job, but you can learn it. Overall, I was looking forward to working with him. Everything else seemed to be falling into place, certainly, there would be no surprises or anything serious to be concerned about.

By the end of my first week at Barnes & Noble Bozeman, it was clear to me that my previous excitement was sorely misplaced. The store manager, well, he was a joke, I have never worked with anyone less competent than him. Ever. His priority was himself, he loved to talk about how great he was; regardless of how aware I might be that people who behave that way are generally compensating for low self-esteem, the behavior is still repulsive. There is a limit to how far people should be allowed to show their egoism, regardless of where it comes from, and he went well beyond that limit before the end of my first week. He also seemed to enjoy asking me to do something and grilling me about why I did whatever he asked me.

There is a path that some people take to work their way through the retail ranks. You can tell a distinct difference between the managers that are both great at the job and want to be there, and those who take this particular path. The following is a behavior to watch out for. You can spot the path in a person’s experience: to work for a company (and perhaps even a specific store) long enough only to gain solid experience in the industry, and then to apply for a promotion within the company, but at a different location, which might present that advance and a clean slate (for less than perfect employees who have a certain ethic about them). And then after a spell in the new location, this employee will leave the company and apply for the same position with a different company; only to follow the same path with the new company. If you make the habit a practice, within a few years, you might be a store manager, albeit a very ineffective, awful, and degenerate store manager, a store manager, nonetheless.

This new store manager spent far more time peacocking and establishing his dominance than he spent learning the trade, developing employees, increasing sales, etc. The store needed to rebuild from a laundry list of past problems (just like Natural Grocers Santa Fe), and a management team more focused on the store than personal ambition. However, he could not get past his need to be in charge. The store manager started working there a few months before I arrived, as soon as I arrived, he seemed to interrupt his busy schedule of being important only to make my days as stressful as possible. The store was not operating smoothly enough independently of his attention to justify his, uh, ‘management style.’

He and I needed to work together because only a small handful of employees were doing their jobs, at least in a way that might benefit them, our customers, and the store. The rest of our employees, um, well, each had among the most unique and unusual ethics and objectivity that I have ever experienced working with or managing a human being. They were good people, young, and they needed significant direction. Most of our employees would clock in at the start of their shifts, and then give themselves a project, regardless of what the priorities might be for the day. Their projects were often as dramatic as to completely rearrange entire sections, sections that not only did not need to be rearranged but that the rearrangement of which made the shopping experience difficult and confusing for both our customers and the other employees looking for titles.

For example, one of our employees arbitrarily removed all the YA mystery, sci-fi, and fantasy books from the YA section and invented independent sections for each genre. The change may seem reasonable, but B&N has no index for YA mystery, sci-fi, or fantasy titles. As far as B&N’s universal catalog system was concerned those sections didn’t exist. And because there is no universal catalog for those sections, for an employee to decide which books to pull from the section and which to leave in the section made no sense. We had enough employees doing some degree of this behavior that trying to manage this, and the needed operations for the day, the customers, the store manager’s ego, all of it was driving me insane; because I had to relearn how to manage not just employees who were hard-working, but hard at work doing things that me or another employee would have to swiftly rework. An example of another odd behavior that more than half of our employees nurtured, was when a customer asked an employee who was behind the customer service desk if we had a particular book, our employees would ask the follow-up question, “Is that a [YA title?] and if the customer said, “No,…[adult fiction,]” our employees would say something along the lines of, “Oh, I only know YA books, I don’t know…” and then walk away.

So, not only did we not have employee-assigned sections, but that has to be the worst customer service I have ever seen. There was an example where I, the assistant store manager, was standing right next to an employee who said exactly that, and I was so taken aback I had to reboot my brain before helping the customer and flagging the employee down later to remind them that we don’t do that. Nearly two-thirds of our employees were doing something to the effect of the same thing. The rest of our employees were hiding in corners reading. Meanwhile, the store manager is spending his days wandering the store looking for opportunities to remind people how great he is.

Oh, and then there’s this other thing I wanted to mention. During my first week on the job, I learned that not even one promise made by the regional manager, when we were talking over the phone, and while I was still in New Mexico, not a single one was being followed through with. I learned that my salary would be nearly ten thousand dollars a year less than what we agreed upon; I was told that I was going to be a salaried employee (I came to learn that not a single assistant manager employed by B&N is salaried, they are all hourly employees, he could easily have told me that), and the number of hours I was promised was subject to the same decreases as even our part-time employees (B&N was consistently reducing hours for hourly employees). This regional manager would also only be our regional for four or five months, the company was splitting regions, and creating a new one, he knew that and never bothered to tell me. He didn’t care. The person who would be our new regional manager was recently promoted from store manager to regional manager.

Concerning her, I have never worked for a more incompetent regional manager anywhere (even the infamous regional for Natural Grocers Santa Fe). I preferred working under the regional who lied about my salary to manipulate me to take the position. Communicating with our new regional was impossible, she would genuinely stop listening when she wasn’t talking. For example, the store manager had asked me one afternoon to move the philosophy section from near the end of religion to the end of theatre/plays. I told him that was a terrible idea, and that it would cause me physical pain to do that, but because he asked me to, I would make the change. I mentioned his request to our new regional manager, and I don’t remember her immediate response; although I very clearly remember her grilling me one afternoon when she visited the store about why philosophy was at the end of theatre/plays.

Seven months after I started managing B&N Bozeman, the store manager sat me down one late morning, and leaning over the edge of his chair, with his hands clasped, he explained that he was leaving and that his last day would be a week from then. He had accepted a store manager position at a small Petco in Florida (remember what I said about the path some managers take?) Which meant that the store manager position would be available. I debated with myself about applying for the position and decided that considering my situation it didn’t make sense not to. I interviewed for the position with our regional manager, and two more of the five scheduled interviews before my regional manager called the store one afternoon and wasted five minutes, easily, berating me about redundant (digital records were kept on computers) paperwork that hadn’t been completed in a week. Throughout the week I was focused on employee development, operational training, covering for the store manager's sudden departure, and keeping the sales floor running smoothly (since I had to watch almost every employee’s every interaction with every customer). I tried to defend myself to our regional manager over the phone, at which point she began flat-out yelling at me through an earpiece. I was floored, as far as I was concerned, her behavior was beyond unacceptable, on top of being absurd. In response, I withdrew my application for the store manager and questioned whether I wanted to continue working for Barnes & Noble Bozeman.

Considering everything Barnes & Noble had done for me—or to me—I was inspired to give my notice. I offered a thirty-day notice at first but left after a fortnight. Barnes & Noble, like McDonald’s, was bought after a businessman saw the potential that the founder of the company had in a bookstore. Len Reggio bought Barnes & Noble in the seventies, I believe—he even helped design the store at 86^th and Lexington that I helped open and had the pleasure of meeting both him and his brother, Steve, who had recently taken over as CEO. In 2019, B&N was sold to Elliot Investments out of the U.K. and chaired by James Daunt. They are ruining Barnes & Noble.

It's amazing how scripted and mechanical a person can be, completely lacking in organic, human behavior. I stumbled on this behavior too often while working for Natural Grocers and Barnes & Noble. My store and regional managers were playing inhuman roles, roles that required responding to boxes checked and unchecked on a report left on their desks and personality tests conducted, there was nothing human or thoughtful about their actions and attitudes. Worse, their frustrations were, to a certain extent, because of my unwillingness to behave the same way. My primary focus was on developing people, because it’s the employees who do the work, and between the two stores a great deal of development was needed.

The thing is that although they should never have spoken to me the way that they did, favoring productivity and belittling human ingenuity is a huge problem in today’s workforce. Well, twenty or thirty years ago it was a problem, today belittling behavior is standard, which is a different problem altogether. Passion and ingenuity are critical in the workforce. Both Natural Grocers and Barnes & Noble, against the odds, have become a part of the problem. I have been conditioned to work for the sake of working for my entire life, and that’s a problem, one of our greatest problems surrounding our ideology of work. The fact that people have no choice but to work, and have never been, a problem, the problems peak with our unwillingness to pursue, diligently, our passions, because our passions inspire our work.

After leaving Barnes & Noble, I applied to and interviewed for several jobs, not one of which I wanted, because we are conditioned to believe that we should be working from a place of desperation and not passion, I was still under the impression that because I left one job I needed to buckle down and find another. My reaction to leaving was so automatic and my actions were unconscious, I was only going through the motions. I stopped and allowed myself to breathe for the first time in what felt like decades, and I allowed myself to shift my thought process, and how I think about work. My mind got quiet and in the silence after the noise went away, I rediscovered a passion I had long ago, I started to focus on a way to make that passion a reality.

I accepted a part-time job at a famous, historic hotel that, because of my employment, allowed me to move into the hotel. At the hotel, I work a few hours a night, I spend my days writing. Only now I needed to get to know myself again and be uncomfortably honest about redefining this life path I spent the last two decades outlining. I’m nearly forty, and the older we get the easier it is to feel stuck in life, a lot of people tend to accept this idea that they made their bed and now they have to sleep in it, to accept the conditions of our past choices. We believe that those choices frame and will continue to frame the course of our lives. We can, however, make conscious choices that influence our course. It might demand creativity, sacrifice, and time; but we need to learn to enjoy the process, not the payoff.