My Best Mistake: Sacked for Being Too Happy

At the ripe old age of 16 and desperately wanting (like lots of young girls) to be a model, I started my first full time job out of school, working as a receptionist at a local law firm. Whilst it wasn’t my dream job, it meant that I was on the first rung of the ladder with a regular wage at the end of the week, albeit a very small one.

Things were going OK, or so I thought, when after only four whole weeks, one of the partners asked to see me in his office. I couldn’t think of anything I had done wrong, so I was a little shocked to find out that I was being let go because I was being too happy and friendly when clients came in to talk about their wills or their divorce and the company didn't think it was appropriate! Fingers crossed for my modeling career working out.

The light at the end of the tunnel …

In my 20s I took a position in telesales at a small company in the UK when we moved because of my husband’s promotion. As soon as I started, I noticed that the morale of the small office really wasn’t good. The product we were selling was in short supply and customer complaints were high. How was the team expected to make its monthly sales targets and earn their commission with no product to sell? Little did I know that the company as a whole was in tremendous financial difficulty and the reason the stock we were trying so hard to sell was in such short supply was because the company was on credit stop with many of its suppliers. So when I put a cartoon on the notice board that I had found in the local paper that said “The light at the end of the tunnel is an oncoming train” – which I thought was funny – I was promptly frog marched into the sales managers office to explain my sense of humor. My humor was not welcome in a company that was in financial difficulties. Time to move on to something a little more me.

Be bold in adversity

From there and through my 20s and early 30s, I spent a good deal of time working and enjoying the life of a store manager across ladies fashion as well as spectacles. Retail is damn hard work with lousy hours but very rewarding, and I wanted to move on up into a regional position. My Ops Director at the time thought it would be a great idea to move me out of store and give me a junior regional manager position, a position that did not exist at the time. You can imagine how the many other store managers that were chomping at the bit for a regional position felt when they learned that I had simply been given the position, a position that was not advertised internally and was the only one “on offer”.

The fall out that ensued was hard to deal with: there was hostility from the current regional managers at my being involved in their meetings albeit at a junior level, and jealousy from those store managers ready for promotion that had been ignored. I was given projects to keep me busy, but the writing was on the wall, the position created had been a huge mistake by the company, the position had to go. It broke every rule in the HR rulebook. That meant I had to be found another role.

Go back to store? Not on your Nelly. Be promoted? Where to? So I asked to be paid off. They knew they were in the wrong, and so they agreed, it was better than making me redundant and all of the negativity that goes with redundancy. I took the money and that was a turning point in my life, a point that took me off to New Zealand.

What have I learned along the way?

• Find a job that fits your personality. If you don’t fit, you will be miserable where ever you work.
• Stuff happens during your life and there is always a way out, a different road to drive down, you just need to look for it.
• Sometimes you just have to ask for what you want and see what happens. If I hadn't asked to leave, my journey would have been very different.

I am now a professional speaker, author and consultant who also spends two months of the year overseeing the exports from our fig orchard to LA, so a great mix of both the business life as well as the good life. What would I change now? I wouldn’t change a thing.

I am very content with where I am now and what I am doing, I hope your career journey has been as rewarding for you.

What career mishaps have you had? I would love to know.

Linda Coles is the author of “Learn marketing with social media in 7 days” (Wiley) and is an author, speaker and trainer on building relationships. She lives in New Zealand on a fig orchard. You can get a free sample of a chapter of her book by registering for her newsletter.

Photo courtesy of Linda Coles