Nancy

A true story about a treasured employee who worked for me many years ago in Minnesota.

Nancy was a wasted resource left to die on the vine for way too long.  She was a fairly long-term employee who held a low pay position with our company.  She was often late for work and used up all of her sick days every year.  She was at the top of her pay grade and was not considered supervisory material. On the plus side, she was a wonderful person, thoughtful, friendly and generally well-liked around the firm.

One day, Joanne, her manager, asked to meet with me.  She had reached the point of no return with Nancy, and needed her out of the department or out of the company. I had just posted an opening for a new job and Joanne asked if I would give Nancy a chance to interview for it.  I agreed, and after matching her strengths and weaknesses to the job description, decided to give her a shot.  I suspected her poor history with being on time and excessive use of sick days was related to her level of responsibility and would improve in a different work setting.

The purpose of this position was to improve the willingness of our independent contractor sales managers to recruit more sales people.  Previously, recruiting required managers to travel on a Saturday night or Sunday morning and check into a motel.  At noon Sunday they started taking phone calls from applicants responding to an ad in that Sunday’s newspaper.  Hopefully by the end of the week they would find the right person to hire.  Sometimes the phone didn’t ring, or no candidate qualified.  That was a wasted trip and the manager would have to do it all over again.  Nancy’s job changed all that.

Nancy would place recruitment ads in three cities, say Miami, Kansas City and Los Angeles.  The ads would ask applicants to phone a toll-free number on Sunday, Monday or Tuesday, between 1:00 and 3:00 p.m. She would be in our Minnesota office taking those calls.  Often her work week started Sunday mornings at 11:30 and ended after 5:00 p.m. to accommodate calls coming from different time zones.   This arrangement gave the sales managers their week-ends back, and if the response was insufficient, they would not have to make the trip at all.

Nancy did very well at this.  She loved the challenge, enjoyed the interaction with sales people, liked talking on the phone and thought the hours were great.  No more fighting early morning traffic getting to the office by 7:30 in the morning and repeating the same administrative routines over and over.  By the end of the year, she was never late for work, never took a sick day off, and for the first time earned a bonus for perfect attendance!

Over the next several years that she worked for me, her responsibilities evolved but I always reserved for her projects that involved some aspect of sales. I encouraged her to consider a sales career.  She was a natural.  For example, when the company introduced personal computers, I was one of the resisters.  When I got frustrated Nancy would smile saying: “Oh Sten, don’t worry, its easy.  Here let me show you.  See how much easier this is and how much more you can get done in less time, etc. “She sold me to the point that I went from a resister, to the number one user of personal computers in the company.

At some point a downturn in our business resulted in a major layoff.  Nancy was one of the employees let go.  I didn’t know where she went, but four or five years later I saw an article in the Minneapolis Chamber of Commerce magazine about a major conference of Women in Business.  There on the list of speakers, representing a large real estate firm, was Nancy!  I couldn’t be sure it was her, but she had an unusual last name so I thought I’d find out.

I left a phone message, and sure enough, when my phone rang the next morning, it was Nancy returning my call.  We had a marvelous conversation catching up on the intervening years.  She said she liked real estate sales and whenever they had a really big deal in the making, she was the one called in to finalize the sale.  I asked about her speech.  She said:

“Oh how I wish you could have been there to hear it.  My message was that this is a man’s world, and any woman wanting to compete needs to have a mentor to look out for her interests and push her in the right direction. My mentor was a man named Tom Stenklyft.”

Needless to say, that phone call made my day!