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Larry Baranow and Lorna Zahn are both kind of bossy, but no one seems to mind.

That's probably why they're in their chosen profession. Both are office managers and though they work in very different industries, they have an awful lot in common.

Baranow is the office manager at a branch office of a national food services company. The company provides vending and coffee services to restaurants, offices, schools and recreation centers. "We're wherever you see vending machines." That includes snack machines, pop machines and coffee machines.

Zahn is the office manager at a telecommunications company, where two-way radios, cellular phones and pagers are the name of the game. "We deal with a lot of logging and transport companies for two-ways, and doctors and realtors for pagers and cell phones," says Zahn.

Both Baranow and Zahn started at the bottom and worked their way up. "It's a good way to get here, because you really do understand the problems of your staff when you've done their job," says Zahn. "That helps you when a staff member has a complaint. You have a pretty good idea if it's legitimate or not."

Baranow also understands his employees pretty well, and considers that one of the most important aspects of his job. "It's funny. When you're at the bottom, you're convinced the boss doesn't understand the stresses of your job. And when you're the boss, you're convinced your staff doesn't understand your responsibilities."

Still, Baranow prefers to be the boss. "It better suits my personality. When this job became available three years ago, it was offered to another staff member first, but he didn't want it. He said he wasn't boss material. He'd be really good at the pleasant stuff, but not so great if he had to get tough. He wanted people to like him too much."

Baranow wants to be liked too, and he feels confident his staff is happy to have him as a boss. "I'm fair. I don't get on an employee's case for nit-picky things, but I expect everyone to pull their weight. If one person isn't doing their share, the rest of the staff feel it, and they expect you -- the boss -- to do something about it."

Zahn knows exactly what Baranow means. She had to fire her boss's son when he worked -- or rather, didn't work -- for the company one summer. "One bad apple can ruin the whole bunch," she says.

"You've got to remember that your job is to manage the office. You want to have a good working relationship with your staff, and you need to be tolerant and flexible, but not to the point where one person is upsetting the whole apple cart."

Usually, any problems that arise aren't so serious if you look at the big picture. Baranow says most of his staff's complaints are easily solved and aren't always job-related.

"You've got some guy whose wife just left him, and you've got to understand that his moodiness comes from more than just the fact that we didn't have a part to fix a vending machine on his route." Baranow feels good about his job when he can help make an employee's bad day better.

Zahn's biggest problems come when a repeater is down and pagers can't get a signal. "It tends to upset doctors when they find out someone's been trying to page them and the system is down. Then you get realtors phoning in that they've just missed a multimillion-dollar sale because they missed one page. People rely on their communications systems."

The front staff is able to deal with most of the complaints, but occasionally, Zahn has to deal with the more difficult ones. But there is a sense of challenge when she's been able to turn around a bad situation -- and that's where Zahn feels the rewards of her job.

Baranow and Zahn agree that training new staff and letting go of staff are the two most difficult parts of their jobs, followed by paperwork, overtime, customer complaints and pressure from above.

But these negatives can turn into positives.

"The greatest high is when you've been inundated and overloaded with complaints and problems in the morning and by the end of the day, everyone goes home happy," says Baranow.

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