First Test
Anyone who has been promoted into a managerial position understands that the day may come when one of the employees challenges a decision or direction that is given. When I began work as the Nursery Manager at Baucum Nursery in North Little Rock, Arkansas I knew that that time might happen. I once asked Tommy Williams, the District Forester in Hardy who was my direct supervisor, about this. His response has resonated with me through the years, “It never occurs to me that they wouldn’t follow my directions.” I have thought of that many times and it is an attitude that I try to maintain. Basically, he was telling me that he did not waste time or energy worrying about the possibility that an employee would not accept legitimate instructions and if and when that happened, he dealt with it then.
All managers have to make choices that their staff will not like, or that some on the team may not agree with. When I became the Nursery Manager at Baucum Nursery in North Little Rock, Arkansas I faced one of these situations, it was my first time as the direct manager of several employees. I was the youngest person there, which was to be the norm for me until I started work in Alaska. In addition, all of the staff were experienced nursery personnel with more knowledge than me in tree seedling production. This made for some interesting situations. Luckily enough I had the sense to listen to them, most of the time anyway, which kept me out of trouble and allowed us to meet our seedling production goals.
But the day finally came when an employee directly challenged me. This was the first but certainly would not be the last time that this happened. RJ and his brother were full time technicians working at the Nursery. They normally came in to work together. Both were good men and particularly good workers, but his brother had the better attitude. RJ seemed to have a small chip on his shoulder on occasion but it never interfered with his work until this day.
We were in the middle of seed prep for the coming planting season. The seed had gone through the stratification process where they had been soaked in water, then in an ice drip and were now spread out on tarps in our processing room, drying. We had large fans blowing air across the seed and they had to be raked hourly to facilitate the drying cycle. As it turned out this extended through a weekend. Since there were so many seed lots, it took two people to rake them quickly enough to prevent spoilage. There were four of us available to do this work, so I split the weekend between two two-person crews. RJ’s brother and another employee would take Saturday leaving Sunday for me and RJ. Friday afternoon, just after noon, I let everyone know the work schedule for the weekend
RJ immediately objected and told me that since the state did not pay overtime, he was not going to come in. That was a fact that all of us objected to, but it was something that I could not resolve. Arkansas did not pay overtime to any of the Forestry Commission employees at that time. The other two employees left the office, having enough experience to understand that we just could not leave the seed unturned throughout the weekend. So, I told him that I would compensate him in corresponding time off. He still objected and told me directly that he was not going to come in. I regret that I did not manage this as tactfully as I should have. I remember putting my right hand in the middle of my desk and pointing at him with my left hand (I am left-handed) and telling him, “RJ, I have over a $100,000.00 in seed on the ground in there. The Forestry Commission pays you $10,000.00 a year. You figure out which is most important to me. I will be here at 0700 Sunday morning and I expect you here at 0800. If you do not show up, do not come back to work on Monday cause you will not have a job.” At this he stalked out of my office. I did not have any idea what would happen on Sunday morning. But I tried to follow what I understood Tommy to tell me. So, I spent as much as I could Saturday with Peggy and the boys and tried hard not to worry about Sunday and RJ.
But Sunday morning came around, as it always had, and I got up, put on my work clothes, ate and went to the nursery complex. Peggy and the boys got up, dressed and went to worship service at the Levy church of Christ in North Little Rock. At 0700 I started raking seeds. The seeds were spread out on tarps measuring about ten feet by ten feet. Each tarp was labeled with the seed stock information including the owner, species, and genetic information. Seeds were spread out on each tarp so that they were no more than about four inches deep in the center and preferably less than two inches deep. We used rakes with handles long enough so that we could rake from the center outward moving all the seed by walking around the perimeter of each trap. We would start from one end of the room moving through all the traps to the other end then immediately start over. It was hard, boring work. But it had to be done. And we had to do this without stepping on any seed since our weight would crush them at this stage of the stratification process. Along with that, the seed on each tarp had to be isolated from the seed on a different tarp. If the seed lot were too large for a single tarp, we would tie tarps together to make for a larger area for that seed lot.
I had been raking for an hour when I heard RJ’s truck pull up. It was 0800 sharp when he came in. He did not say a thing to me, just got a rake and started on a row of tarps. We worked most of the day like that, not saying much at all to one another. Finally, he began to talk some and we finished the day early in the evening. It cooled enough during the night that I did not have to worry too much about spoilage so I did not have a night shift. I did not have the staff for it anyway and had no idea what I would have done had that been necessary other than getting firefighters from the districts to come in.
Monday morning, we started raking the seed again and by noon they were completely dry and ready for the next step in the seed preparation process. This included putting the seed in a cement mixer like you can buy at almost any farm supply or hardware store. We would put about 50 pounds of seed in the mixer at a time and add liquid latex. This was a messy process and the seed would clump into big, sticky, balls coated in latex. Once the seed was sufficiently coated with latex, we added a fungicide and a rodent repellant then a cup of aluminum powder to the mix of seed and latex. Letting the mixer run for a few minutes resulted in each individual seed being coated with fungicide, rodent repellent, and aluminum powder. They were beautiful, all silver and shining. And they were so slippery that they could not be picked up by hand. Each batch was reweighed to the hundredth of a pound and put into burlap bags to be stored while they waited to be planted, which happened within a day or two.
On Thursday morning, RJ came in and asked if I was serious about giving him time off for the time he worked that past Sunday. I told him that I was, we agreed on how much he worked on Sunday and I gave him 1.5 hours off for each hour he worked. I did the same for the two who worked the past Saturday. From that time on, I had no challenges to the decisions I made nor to the directions I gave at the nursery… well at least none that I heard about anyway.