Aug 11 2026 | By: Charlene Stackle
In my career, I was one of four managers on a brand new merchandising team at Home Depot. We were the inside version of an outside vendor relationship. Companies like Rust-Oleum paid us to represent their products on Home Depot's shelves instead of flying someone in from across the country every time something needed attention. Between the four of us, we had about twenty associates, and my job was to make sure the ones on my team were representing those vendors well.
I came into that job with extensive retail training. My dad put me in retail young, and he was precise about everything. I remember running a ticket gun at eleven or twelve years old and being told exactly where the tag went, upper right-hand corner, keep it straight every time. Everything was precise with my dad. Everything was uniform, professional, correct. And I took that with me into management without ever really examining it.
So I followed up on my associates' work constantly. Trust but verify, I told myself, and there's nothing wrong with that on its own. The problem was I didn't know where the line was between holding a standard and nitpicking every single thing. Yes, I was that micromanager. I hammered quality so hard that we were slow. The program was so new that there wasn't much room yet to notice that the real issue wasn't quality or quantity. It was me.
The tension built for months. My team was frustrated, and they were beaten down. I wasn't shy about correcting people or pointing out what was wrong, and somewhere along the way I'd decided that everyone just needed to fall in line. That was even a phrase our supervisors used. What I didn't see, because I genuinely didn't know I'd messed up that badly, was how much damage that mindset was doing to the people who worked for me.
One of my direct reports, a guy with a military background, was the one who finally suggested I sit down with the whole team and just ask them what was wrong. I knew exactly what I'd be walking into if I did that. It didn't feel like a meeting. It felt like a tribunal I'd summoned on myself, my own inquisition, and I already knew exactly who'd be standing trial. I remember the night before, dreading it, thinking I really did not want to have this conversation. But the pressure had built to the point where I needed the release valve more than I needed to avoid the discomfort.
So I called the meeting. I sat at the table with my direct reports and let them say what they needed to say. I didn't get defensive. I didn't go back to my-way-or-the-highway. We just talked, really talked, about what they needed from me and what I needed from them, and somewhere in that conversation we found what an actually workable relationship between us could look like.
After that, I stopped picking at every single thing and started paying attention to the things that actually mattered, the no-duh issues instead of every small deviation. I want to be clear that this didn't turn me into a perfect manager overnight. There's no such thing as a perfect manager, and there's no such thing as a perfect leader either, which is a good thing. But I became a better one that day, because it opened up an actual channel of communication with my team instead of a one-way flow of corrections.
The part that mattered most wasn't the meeting itself. It was what I did afterward. Was I going to keep my word, or was this just going to be lip service before I reverted back to who I'd been? The same direct report with the military background, the one who'd suggested I sit down with the team in the first place, told me years later that he was genuinely surprised I'd actually gone through with it. "I wouldn't have done that," he said, even though the whole thing had been his idea.
I think about that a lot now. How willing you are to hear that you got it wrong, and to actually change instead of just absorbing the feedback and moving on the same way you always have. There are still boundaries as a leader. You're not throwing out standards or letting go of what matters. But the boundaries are looser than most of us think they are, and most of the time the process someone else uses to solve a problem doesn't need to be your process. It just needs to get them where they're going.
I've read a lot of leadership books over the years. Some of them are genuinely good. But there are some things you don't actually learn from a book. You learn them by sitting down at the table with the people you've been leading badly, and letting them tell you the truth, and then meeting them on equal footing from there on out.
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