Secrets of Empowerment: Life Lesson Part 2

This part is the hardest to write. Not for being the worst, it was bad, but I have survived so much worse! The simple answer is that there was A LOT going on all at the same time. The problem is that for this accounting to all make sense I have to go over enough of everything. I will have to leave a lot of details out especially for what happened at Massage Chain. I will also tell each part separately even though they happened at the same time. Deep breath! I will start with what happened at Massage Chain.

The first manager at Massage Chain had for several weeks “disappeared”. She came in and went into her office only leaving to bark orders, take care of a few things only she could do and go back to….something. All of this was extremely uncharacteristic of her. Up to this point Jamie had been one of my favorite managers. And I have been working since I was 17 years old…that is a serious compliment! I wanted to ask her what was wrong, but I trusted her. I knew that when it was time, she would tell us what was going on and help us all get through it. I was only partially right. Jamie didn’t micromanage her staff. If you couldn’t do your job, you didn’t work there. So even though things were obviously not right, we did our jobs like usual and an outsider wouldn’t have noticed the extra tension.

There was a team meeting that I had to miss. I didn’t hear anything from anyone, so I wasn’t expecting things to be different. But at my next shift I noticed a few things; 1) all of the clients I saw were very angry, 2) Jamie was in a much better mood…