Good Management

This past Labor Day, Minnesota Public Radio asked listeners to call in and describe their first job. Where did you work and what life lessons did you learn? Well, I started down my illustrious career path as a Salad Bar Attendant at Valentino’s Grand Italian Buffet in Sioux Falls, South Dakota at age fourteen. My recently divorced parents didn’t make much money as a married couple, so now that everyone was single we were all strapped for cash and looking for work. For $4.25/hour, I donned a white button-down shirt, black pants, red bow tie, red & green polyester apron and sensible black shoes and entered an all-you-can-eat-pizza-buffet kitchen without air conditioning during the hot, humid summers of 1991 & 1992.

On my first day, I dropped a crock of creamy bleu cheese dressing on the tiled kitchen floor, launching one quart of the chucky glop in all directions. Troy, the line cook standing 10 feet away, yelled “Job opening!” and then bent down to wipe bleu cheese from his black rubber-soled shoes. The manager handed me a mop. “I’m not laughing at you. I’m laughing near you” he chuckled, also swooping down to clean dressing from his shoes.

Over the next year, I proved efficient at setting up the salad bar in the morning, keeping the crocks of cubed ham, sliced olives and chilled carbonara pasta well stocked during the day, and tearing down the salad bar at night. No crock would remain unfilled! Each leaf of decorative kale would be cleaned of all impacted cheddar cheese shreds and repositioned over the iced salad buffet with care! Each personal salad called for three cucumber slices, two tomato wedges, and a few onion circles with croutons over iceberg lettuce, but each would be arranged artfully! Those were my credos; other Salad Bar Attendants simply lived by their smoke breaks.

I was an overly responsible employee and a straight-A student, striving for perfection in all things. Because financial bombs dropped almost daily on my household, though, I was also a serious worrier. I didn’t realize that I had stopped smiling until a few weeks into my job when the franchise owner, John Jones, assured me that it was okay to laugh more often. So, perhaps the most important life lesson for me was learning how to smile in my own over-achieving, stoic way during my two years at Valentino’s. It certainly helped to work with a host of silly and wonderfully kind people in that hot kitchen - John, Joel, Troy, Renee, Greg, Rick, Jill, Melissa and many others.

Looking back, I think I was truly spoiled at my first job. Valentino’s managers created an atmosphere where working hard was expected, but so was having a sense of humor. Managers worked alongside us, helping transport pizzas between the kitchen and the buffet, washing dishes or making pizzas when things got busy. They were genuinely kind and they were definitely funny, much like their employees. What I most treasure is that they took this introverted fourteen year old girl and helped her find a little levity in her day and connect her with the team.

Many of my managers haven’t yet mastered this fine art of good management, which is a precious, wonderful gift to employees, both individually and as teams. Thank you John and Joel - my first two managers at Valentino’s – for setting high expectations and serving as strong examples of what good management can do for employees.