Know who is delivering your packages

Kindness is key.  I am always a fan of being kind and learning when I can.  I found out with my job experience that sometimes a little kindness can go a very long way. The different industries have been anywhere from white color to blue color jobs.  But many of the lessons that have helped me in my white color jobs were learned in the lesser jobs titles that I held.  One of those titles was a warehouse manager of the parts department at a car dealership.  This was all in all a rather easy job that was based more along the lines of managing people to do a remedial task over and over again.  The reality was that he was a job most of the people were not going to be able to get out of.  They were limited due to their life choices but working with them helped me to learn how to help us all.  The biggest thing I learned was from a long-term warehouse worker who was good friends with most people in the store. The advice I was given was to know all the package delverers.  

Being a nice guy I learned my delivery guys' names, and tried to be as helpful as I could.  They dropped off orders every single day to our store and took our items that we needed to send to other companies who purchased them from us.  This advice I got ended up helping me to be successful.  The last manager apparently was a bit of a jerk and thought that shipping supplies and all the people involved were worthless overpaid people.  This meant that the people who delivered and picked up all our goods in his eyes were bad.  What this ended up doing was greater than he ever imagined.  It turns out that the drivers of these companies had a lot of control over our business.  They could show up after hours or deliver items damaged and vise versa.  They had a lot of power in a warehouse that was dependent upon shipping.  These people were the shipping supplies key to being successful and getting products first. 

My old co-worker had experience.  Not a ton of knowledge but he knew from his time what was important.  This man was not a smart guy and he knew it.  The fact was that he was only able to do manual labor because he chose that for himself.  But his experience was life-changing in that I knew now that even the smallest person in my own company or involved with my company could have massive impacts. 

I got to know our delivery drivers well and they got to know me.  I am still fond of several of them and it turns out that our damaged goods bill went down about half, when I started to manage that position.  That meant that cars were fixed on time much more often and our entire store was shined upon.  Not everyone knew that part of this was my doing, that didn't really matter.  I knew I was helping and was going to get a great recommendation someday.  I was not arrogant and was kind and it ended up paying off for me big time. So I hope my advice helps and that your company grows.