When I started working as a warehouse supervisor at Hewlett Packard Enterprise, I expected a leading tech company to have, you know, some actual tech. Instead, I found a warehouse where people were writing bin numbers on pads of paper like they were ordering from a diner menu in 1982.
Every item that came off a trailer was manually tracked. Unload, find an empty bin, write the bin number on a sheet, then eventually enter it in SAP. Shockingly, this resulted in a lot of errors. Even more shockingly, no one seemed particularly bothered by that.
So I did what every well-meaning, freshly hired supervisor does. I made a plan.
I wanted to implement barcode scanning in the receiving process. It wasn’t revolutionary. It was barely modern. But it made sense. It would streamline receiving, reduce mistakes and (here’s the part where I was incredibly naive) it was the right thing to do.
I assumed that if I laid out the logic clearly, people would jump on board. We’d save time We’d look good. We’d make fewer errors. Who wouldn’t want that?
The answer, it turns out, was pretty much everyone who worked in that warehouse.
These were long-tenured employees. Some had been there since back when the company was still Cray Research. They knew the building better than I did. They knew the inventory better than I did. And to them, I was the outsider with no credibility, showing up to change a system they’d been using for decades.
I tried everything I thought would work. I made diagrams. I explained benefits. I walked through the new workflow step-by-step. I thought if I just kept pointing to the logic, they’d eventually see it.
They didn’t.
The resistance wasn’t loud. It was quiet. Passive. Stuff just didn’t get done. Training sessions got postponed. Test scans mysteriously failed. Feedback was always the same. “This just isn’t how we do things.”
Meanwhile, my boss, who could suck the oxygen out of a room with a single email, offered no help at all. She’d disappear for days, give zero direction, then come back furious that I hadn’t done something the way she would have if she had ever bothered to say it out loud.
One day, she told me to go talk to a warehouse worker out of quitting. I asked what tools I had to work with. Could I offer more money? Better hours? PTO? She looked at me like I’d asked for a unicorn. I guess I was supposed to go over there and appeal to his sense of loyalty or guilt him into staying. When I nervously laughed and said I wasn’t sure what she expected me to say, she lost it. She accused me of laughing at her. She said I was disrespectful. Humiliating stuff. The kind of stuff that sticks with you.
That job broke me down in ways I still don’t like admitting. I cried at work more than once. Not because I was weak. Because I was trying to lead in a system that didn’t want to be led, for a boss who couldn’t see the difference between motivation and manipulation.
But here’s the twist. I still got the barcode scanning implemented.
I had to build a team from scratch. We had to involve software developers, network engineers, and a couple of sympathetic managers who saw the writing on the wall. It took months. It was clunky at first, but eventually it worked. We created a web app that fed directly into SAP. Receiving got faster, accuracy improved, and mistakes dropped. I redesigned some of the workflows, too, using spaghetti diagrams to eliminate wasted motion.
And the same people who fought me on the way in? Some of them came around. Not all, but enough to keep things moving.
So no, logic didn’t motivate the team. Not at first. What eventually worked wasn’t a perfect argument. It was persistence. It was making the system work around them until it started working for them. And it was learning that leadership isn’t just about having the best idea. It’s about surviving the part where no one cares.
Sometimes you fail forward. Sometimes you just survive long enough for the system to catch up with your idea.
And sometimes you spend your lunch break crying in your car and then get back out and do it anyway.