Leadership under time pressure: a store manager reports

I like the late shift. When I ride my bike home around midnight, it’s quiet and I get quiet too. Half an hour on the bike helps me let go of the problems of the day. The market is closed, the lights are off at home, no one wants anything from me for the next few hours.

I have been a store manager at a large grocery chain for ten years. I currently manage a market in an outskirts of Hamburg. We are open six days a week from 7 a.m. to 11 p.m. and work with 50 people in a shift system. This is a tight calculation, but the budget is set by the headquarters.

Due to a lack of staff and the long opening hours, I have to work a lot in the store myself, in addition to my tasks such as supplying goods, quality assurance, personnel planning and warehouse optimization. There is hardly any time for leadership tasks and good management of employees, but they are extremely important.

Contact person for all kinds of questions

In retail, people can’t avoid each other. During a shift, everyone sees what each other is doing. If the colleague at checkout one gets up to smoke, the queue for the colleague at checkout two gets longer. If she gets up again, they argue.

Smoking breaks, behavior in the market, shifts, vacation days – everything can lead to conflicts and they all end up with me because there are no hierarchies in the market. I am the contact person for all 50 employees. Several times a day someone comes to me and asks, “Do you have five minutes?” I say, “Yeah, sure, let’s go to my office” – and I really hope that it’s really only five minutes, that it won’t be half an hour, because I have 38 other things on my list.

Manager, introvert – energy level: declining

Sometimes I think: If you would just talk to each other, I wouldn’t have to waste tens of minutes of my working time here. On the other hand: The person has a need and a right to be taken seriously. Even if I may not understand their problem. I expect myself to do everything as optimally as possible and to move it forward, including through discussions. And the employees have expectations of the leadership role that I try to live up to, regardless of my character. Because I would describe myself as an introvert. Conversations cost me energy. After each encounter, I notice how my energy level has dropped further. At a certain point I have to force myself to listen.

What I miss are recovery phases. As soon as one of them leaves the office, the next one is standing in front of me. I am not only the first point of contact for employees, but also for everything else that happens in the market. A customer wants to complain, the food inspectorate has to check the temperature in the freezers, the fire department checks whether the escape routes are clear, the police come because an alcoholic was rioting in front of the market. And then I hear two employees arguing about the roster.

A constantly thin thread of patience – even after work

It is a constant psychological stress that wears on your nerves. At work, I sometimes notice how I become passive-aggressive towards employees. Answer briefly. My tone slips. I can no longer have the same patience for the fifth who wants something from me as I did for the first – even though he would have the same right to it. At home with my husband I’m in a bad mood and my patience is running thin.

Since so much builds up during the shift, I take a lot of problems home with me and think: How could this conflict be solved? What can I do there? As a store manager, I am responsible for everything, so my work emails are sent to my personal cell phone and I read them after my ten-hour shift. New problems come to me even when I’m free. I can rarely really switch off. If someone writes to me that they want to talk, I answer and try to clarify the situation from home: Can it wait until tomorrow? Can he ask my deputy?

Permanent lack of time

We have an open corporate culture, I appreciate that. We address each other by their first names, are on first name terms, and also talk about private matters. I have the impression that it is easier for employees to be honest when I am open and approachable. Maybe that’s why so many people come to me with their problems.

If it were otherwise, they would probably say less and I would have less to do. But a working atmosphere in which everything is kept quiet? I would find that terrible! What stresses me out is not that employees come to me with their worries and needs, but rather the time pressure. My days are so long and yet there is always a lack of time. It would be ideal if I could devote 80 percent of my working time to management tasks and communication. Currently it is more like 40 percent. Many conflicts arise just because of this.

For example, it is almost impossible to set up the roster in such a way that no one feels disadvantaged. But if I had time to explain to colleague A: “On Monday I didn’t give you the morning shift as usual, I gave you colleague B because she wanted to go to her grandma’s birthday party in the afternoon,” she might be disappointed, but accept it. If I don’t do it and colleague A finds out from the roster that someone else has gotten her morning shift, there will be stress. Some conflicts I only see when they escalate and then take much longer to contain them again. I put out one fire at a time.

Simply giving up leadership is not an option. I have such an urge to create, I need the freedom to change and improve something. Otherwise I’ll go crazy. What I would like to do is run my own market as a franchise entrepreneur. Then I could decide for myself how much money I spend on staff, hire more people – and have more time for them.

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