For those of you lucky to have ever worked in the retail or the food industry, you know it's one of the most thankless employments you'll ever have had.
Starting in college, I've worked in four kitchens, always almost inevitably rising to some sort of supervisory status due to the fact that I'm someone who's mother raised her on the idea if you're going to do something half-assed, you might as well not do it at all. Which means my bosses always liked me. Which means my co-workers thought I was a teacher's pet. Which means all I had left to do was continue meeting and attempting to exceed expectations (and make friends with my bosses because obviously that wasn't going to happen with my equals).
I digress.
Managing anything and the people that come with it is something I truly believe can only be learned on the job and never really taught. And it really is all or nothing. You get it or you don't. Sink or swim. Ahoy ahoy.
It's finding out how to speak 25 different languages, because not everyone takes criticism or direction the same way. It's realizing that doing the right thing and capitalizing on teaching moments results in more responsibilities placed on your shoulders, because no one else sees the bigger picture. It's taking that same awareness and using it to run someone else's business. It's being handed bad cards, and although everyone's replaceable, there just isn't time or energy to find good enough replacements. It's having to cater to a consumer who doesn't have it in them to be polite for their 1-second interaction with you, when you've been doing it for 10 hours because it's your job.
Then, there's the weird hierarchy. Suddenly you find yourself a parent figure to the people who answer to you: being bummed when they're sick, comforting them when they're having a bad day, wondering how the hell they're capable of making you so angry over mistakes they're obviously still learning from and beating yourself up later for how you spoke to them when it was really just heat of the moment. It's finding the words for apologies over forgetting they're human, in all its imperfection.
The people above you, as much as they intimidate you, as much as a helicopter parent might hover, become conceptual lifelines. Hopefully they get it — hopefully they sympathize with you, the way you do with your people below you. Hopefully they see you're human, too. Hopefully, they remember to thank you. Hopefully they always keep on the back burner what they first saw in you to want to make you a supervisor. A lot of the times, you're trained in their image and style. Meaning your management is really a reflection of them. Meaning that's why they're so hard on you. Because they're probably projecting. God knows I am.
Managing has huge takeaways. Positive and negative. You'll learn so much patience (and become quickly and also grossly aware there's a long way for you to still go); you'll learn to analyze the human carnival with all its intricacies including where and how you fit into the mix. You'll learn to lose sleep, both willingly and accidentally — agonizing over how to compensate for an understaffed shift during a hellish busy hour or season, having weird dreams about what you all do at work.
That's when you see your pride's involved now, too.
Your work, and whether it runs smoothly or not, mirrors who you are. And whether you dislike what you do or love it to pieces becomes irrelevant, because now you've been there long enough that it's more than just a footnote in your life. It's a solid chapter. The work is the theme, the people and place act as letters, a given day becomes punctuation, and you're the writer putting it all together as coherently as you know how.
For all the managers out there, for all the employees vying for a higher position: It gets harder. But the things you'll pick up, your continued development, not only as a supervisor, but a human being, the satisfied feeling you get more days than not over the idea that the business runs because you're there. It's worth the experience, every time. If it's a bad time, you'll learn where the pitfalls were and take them with you to the next opportunity. If it's a good time, you'll learn that, all this, and so much more.
