As an 18-year-old, I worked (briefly) as a store detective/security guard. I was awful, somewhat intentionally. That role followed a litany of failures that now make for an interesting case study on how not to manage (almost every facet of) human risk.
Start as you mean to go on
After filling out lengthy paper applications – no copy and paste in 1996 – I traipsed around the nearest nice town to where I lived, Richmond (now famous courtesy of Ted Lasso).
A mid-range clothes store eventually called me in for an interview. The Office wouldn’t air in the UK for another five years, but a Gareth-Brent lovechild ran this operation. I’ll call her Peggy here. She suggested I work for free for “a few days”, so she could test my mettle and ability to handle the “high-pressure environment” that is folding synthetic jumpers. Her co-manager, a battle-weary former cabin crew member, grimly clinging on to hope that there was hope for humanity, intervened. Free labour wasn’t on-message with company policy. Peggy begrudgingly offered me a “trial” period of a couple of days on a temporary contract. She warned me, “I’ll be watching you, and I’ve got eyes in the back of my head. End of.”
Inspiring leader
Peggy expected us, the contract fodder, to arrive 30mins before each shift for her daily pep talk and team meeting (overtime was unpaid). I wished smartphones had been invented to capture:
🤘 The one where she talked about her “winner” husband who’d been turned down from the SAS (elite military unit) for being “too aggressive”. He was an armed response police officer – not a branch of the UK military, 🤔.
🤘 When she bollocked me in front of everyone in my first week for wearing the same fire-hazard polyester shirt, trousers, and tie I was mandated to buy from the store (with a gracious 25% discount). I’d paid for the outfit from savings as I’d not yet received my minimum wage paycheck to add more mauve misery to the wardrobe.
🤘 The one where the armed response unit played a football match against a rival police unit, and her heroic husband had “broken a few legs [dramatic pause, look around for approval].”
🤘 The dozens of meetings (I lasted about five months) where she berated us for failing to hit sales targets. Explaining that it was impacting her (and other managers’ bonuses). Contract workers didn’t get bonuses.
🤘 Telling us to stay until 12am (unpaid) on Xmas Eve to set up for the Boxing Day sales, and in for 4.30am to prepare for the 6am opening on Boxing Day. I learned courtesy of a very long and freezing 3hr walk home that my bus didn’t run past 12am on Xmas Eve (or 3.30am on Boxing Day…).
🤘 Kicking a gay colleague in the butt and then saying, “I nearly lost my boot up there”.
My first brushes with fraud
After the January sales died, the store shut for “stocktake day”. My colleagues arrived looking like backup singers in a Snoop Dog video. Unusual for Richmond.
The baggy tracksuits (sweatpants) were intentional. To a person, they planned to steal as much clothing as was feasible, wearing it under their velure and shellsuits. Peggy had decamped to the pub – counting stock was for the prols. She’d miss the Tellytubbies waddling out, sweating, later that afternoon. Cabin crew no. 2 was in on the scam and locked up.
I didn’t speak up. I didn’t care. The company had made me listen to East17’s “Stay Another Day”, “Fastlove” by George Michael, and Toni Braxton’s “Un-Break My Heart” on loop (with a couple of other clangers) for a month – a tactic the CIA would soon adopt. By the end of December, I was sure Toni’s lyric “Say that you love me” was actually “sage and onion” (YouTube it and judge for yourself; skip to 3:55). I would have confessed to most crimes after that Christmas cracker cassette.
Then, a few weeks later, I arrived at the stockroom to hear a couple of colleagues had been fired for fraud schemes involving returned gift cards exchanged for cash. Again, I sympathised.
Patrolling lingerie
By now, I was on the 5am shift in the stockroom. I loved it. We could play our own music, avoid customers, chat rubbish without fear, eat McDonald’s breakfast, and escape sooner. But Peggy had other ideas. During one lunch break (at the village green I’d escape too), a breathless colleague interrupted my Boots Meal Deal. I had to return urgently, “Someone just stole hundreds of pounds of underwear”.
In her infinite wisdom, Peggy had decided that I was the perfect undercover store detective to patrol the women’s underwear and “petite” areas (where most thefts occurred). I did explain that my “cover” – wandering around pretending, at length, to be perusing panties for my non-existent but diminutive girlfriend – was about as credible as my securing a date with Natalie Imbruglia. Peggy wasn’t for turning.
I was so bored that I invented endless games – mainly unrepeatable, but I became good at guestimating sizes by sight. In the years that have followed, I’ve come to understand the terror some men feel entering lingerie sections of a mall. So my profiling of male customers – assuming only men stole stuff, despite tracksuit shoplifting day – and following them around like a serial killer picking a victim, would have deterred countless sales. Most (all?) of the women also didn’t much appreciate the gawky teen with a horrendous homemade Eddie Vedder undercut trying not to stare at their selections.
The thefts stopped, but at what cost?
It was my swansong assignment. As sales slowed again (wonder why?), I was summarily fired (no notice). It was a relief. I got a much better job – inputting whisky prices into a spreadsheet for market research firms. Buy bourbon in Scotland (where it’s perceived as foreign filth and discount-priced), top tip.
How not to do, well, everything
Remembering Peggy, I imagine she and psycho-cop moved to run a pub in their semi-retirement. One of those pubs in dying seaside towns, where effluent laps upon the shoreline, and huge garden benches are chained to concrete moorings in the post-apocalyptic’ beer garden’. Bedecked in nationalistic memorabilia and “You don’t have to be crazy to work here…” posters.
I’m so grateful I got that job so early in my life. It was a masterclass on how not to manage.
💣 Don’t mess people around during the interview and onboarding process. Yes, some of us will still take the job (as we need it), but we’ll likely pay your bad faith forward.
💣 Don’t talk rubbish – especially from your personal life. Almost no one cares. And those that do, care because you offended them.
💣 Don’t beast people on targets, *especially* not if they stand to gain much less than you.
💣 Ask “why” more. Especially when 30 people arrive wearing lightweight tracksuits in late January.
💣 Focus more on strategy than tactics – “Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.” (That quote is usually attributed to Sun Tzu, but it doesn’t appear in his writings).
So what?
If you work in risk, ethics, compliance, sustainability, etc., you might think, what’s this to do with me? Most risks I’ve seen stem from leadership, middle management, and human decision-making, not control failures.
Your job will be tough if the employee intake, onboarding, goal-setting, job spec, and middle-management capacity are lacking. It might seem tricky to change things well beyond your job scope, but there are ways we can measure the (dis)function in those crucial areas. This data should get the attention of senior leaders, as it’s all money they’re leaving on the table (suboptimal performance, disengagement, fraud, etc.).
If you want to know how, shoot me a message.