My fourth job was the fastest one to be over. I started at the local Perkins restaurant as a cook during July of 2017, and it was one of the most trying experiences of my life. Within my first three shifts I realized that I was working with a lot of people who were very unhappy humans. This led to a lot of stress in management, which led to a lot of anger from the employees underneath. The biggest lesson I learned about sales from Perkins was how to sell myself. I very quickly realized that I needed to sell myself, since as a cook, I wasn’t tasked with selling a product or service.
My boss was someone who took the stress in her life outside of work, and took it out on her employees, so the mentality of the employee was to “suck up” to her, so you don’t get fired. This was hard for me because I really believe that you should always work your hardest and do the best you can, and that people in charge will honor that. Unfortunately, this is not often the case. I had to wrestle with whether I was willing to compromise my values of responsibility and respect, to keep my job. I ended up standing strong to what I believed, and my boss saw that and respected it. Instead of trying to put myself ahead of others to “look better”, I sold myself as an honorable person, who respected her manager. It served me well, because my boss really valued having a person like that around, because I was honest with her about why things were hard, and how things could get better.
In the end, I only worked there for a month because I decided to come to GCC full time in August, but I learned a lot about how to be who I am and that people will respect it.
testacr22
Awesome story Tess. Learning to sell yourself without sucking up to people is a lesson many people don’t learn to later in life. Dealing with that kind of boss sounds especially difficult, but from what you’ve shared, being upfront and honest with them seems like the best way to sell yourself without compromising your values.