My opinion is all based out of one office/region, and largely based on management.
The general manager was not very hands on with smaller issues and accounts. He treated all of us differently depending on his mood or personal opinion of you. We never knew when he would be in the office, he would often come in late or leave early, claiming he worked a lot more overtime than he seemed to. Part of this was that his family did not live near where he worked, so he would drive hours away for weekends and holidays, which is completely understandable.
He loved quizzes and guessing games where you had little chance of reading his mind for the answer. One quarter, he told us we didn’t work hard enough and deserved to have our bonus taken away, which we only received because we worked hard. He has since been transferred to an office closer to his family, where he is working more with operations than sales.
Working in an office that was already understaffed became chaotic when we got a new inside sales manager. He came from an outside sales background, so was pretty smart about the market, types of metal, and uses. However, he had only done the inside sales job for less than a year. He had very little experience in the role we were doing, and did not make an effort to understand what we went through on a daily basis. He spoke down on us often, asking demeaning questions, offering obvious solutions that had already failed while trying to problem solve, and contradicting himself almost daily. He did not really know how to use the system we used for what we needed it for, only for managerial things. He was unable to help out with our workload on a daily basis or if someone was out on vacation. This was particularly not helpful when we were able to get new people, we ended up doing a lot of the training for him. It was very difficult to explain things to him sometimes, he simply could not comprehend what you were saying if you thought of an innovative or creative way to solve a problem. The local outside sales representatives avoided coming in the office so they wouldn’t have to deal with him.
He was an incredible micromanager and would often check up on projects unnecessarily, which always took precedent over what you were currently working on. He was not clear on what he wanted from us, it depended on what he was getting yelled at by his superiors, I would imagine. There seemed to be multiple arguments with him per day. Some days we didn’t make enough sales, some days we didn’t make enough out calls. We were expected to grow immensely when we were already struggling with such a small staff. Due to some changes in another office, we were given more work with larger accounts, and it was not shared very fairly. We redivided our districts, and again a few months later when we got two new people from the Academy. We all began working a lot of overtime, and failing to complete our daily tasks. Tensions grew to be very high, and morale decreased, especially since we started getting yelled at for too much “chit chat” and not enough activating new customers.
There was not a lot of leadership, but definitely a lot of bossing around.
The most frustrating part about this, is that several people have left this year, not necessarily the company, but that particular sales office, yet this man got a promotion. I can’t believe he, and the company, don’t understand that he is the problem. I think that speaks to how much this company listens to valid criticism.
I actually liked my job, my coworkers, my customers. It wasn’t glamorous, but I cared, and I was good at it. The sole reason I left was because of management and the incredible stress they caused me.
