I interviewed John Ruskauff, General Manager at Kinko’s Copies here in town and I was quite impressed with his management style. I opened with the standard questions about his education, former experience and how long he had been with Kinko’s.
I have a Bachelor’s degree in Human Resources from Baker College in Michigan. I have a certificate in Teaching English as a Foreign Language and I taught English in Mexico for three years. I came back six years ago and I’ve been with Kinko’s ever since. I actually started at Kinko’s back in 1990, as a front-counter person and worked my way up to middle management but then decided to take a ‘sabbatical’ in Mexico. But I did well when I was here before, so they took me back. A few months later the manager left and I took the job. So here I am (Ruskauff, 2008).
I was very interested in his story about Mexico, but I knew I had to move on. I then asked him about his management style and what he considered to be effective and ineffective management.
I see two main differences. The first, and most important, is the ability to leave my emotions at the door. What I mean by that is that while business is important and it should be taken seriously, at the end of the day, it’s just business. We can’t let our emotions get in the way of what’s best for the business. This is not to say that I don’t have feelings about what I do; that would be a lie. I just don’t show them. Here, we have such a constant contact with the customer that we have to remember that we are on stage almost all the time. Anything we say and do is scrutinized by the customers. So, our emotions have to be checked at the door.
The second main difference I see is the ability to have a macro view of the operations and staff. I can’t be micro managing, picking apart everything everyone does. A manager who does that might have the best intentions thinking that they have a hands-on approach, but there’s nothing worse for a co-worker than to have their boss breathing down her neck. It shows distrust. Plus, the co-workers know their jobs better than I do. We have key-operators here that are unbelievably fast and accurate. I watch them and I know that when I have to fill in temporarily, that I’m doing everything the hard way. I have so much respect for the knowledge and skill of our staff (Ruskauff, 2008).
Very impressive. I’m sure that that respect is reciprocated. I then asked him about what skills he uses at work and which are most crucial to the position.
“All of them, all the time and some I didn’t think I had,” he said, chuckling (Ruskauff, 2008).
Really, this is a much more diversified business than some people give it credit for. At the end of the day, we’re just a copy shop. Fair enough. But we have a lot of different aspects in, for example, taking a large order for an architectural firm. If we follow the process, the first step is the first contact with the customer. This is where we have to be the most professional and have our Kinko’s Face at its shiniest. The order taker has to be completely fluent with every aspect of the business so that she can communicate the order, especially ones that encompass many different aspects such as oversize, collated production on the 5090 or Docutech, binding, color – what have you. Ok, so now we’ve taken the order. Now it’s scheduling. If the customer is right in front of us, we need to know that now. That puts some pressure on the staff, because we don’t always know. But the customer wants to know. Then, it’s the actual production, which, like I said, can entail a lot of different services (Ruskauff, 2008).
He was right; it was a lot more entailed than I had imagined and it was very interesting, but I had to redirect him a little bit on the question. He spoke more about the skills that his staff had and I was more interested in what his particular skills were. After clarifying my question, he responded,
OK, I get it. Well, what I said before pertains to me, as well. But as a manager, I have a few other responsibilities. I obviously do all of the hiring and firing but, in my six years, I’ve never had to fire anyone who’d been here longer than her three month probationary period. I also have the basic accounting like cash control, deposits and change orders. We don’t have to do register tapes anymore, thank goodness, but the profit and loss and inventory are under my control. I do the scheduling sometimes, but I have one of the assistant managers do that for the most part. That’s pretty much it. It’s not an excessive amount of work, but it’s a lot of responsibility. There’s also a great deal of time management involved. I have to make sure that I have time to take care of everything and multitasking is a way of life around here (Ruskauff, 2008).
I then asked him about what kinds of things work well managing a staff and what things don’t.
Well, like I said, I can’t be breathing down anyone’s neck. That totally doesn’t work. But the successful manager spends most of her time out on the floor with the staff. Most of the time, when I come in, the first thing I ask the floor manager is ‘Where do you need me? What can I do to help? and work mostly as an auxiliary hand. Sometimes there’s leftover binding or folding from the night before, or even the store needs to be vacuumed because they didn’t have time before they left. Many mornings you’ll find me in here vacuum in one hand, and a coffee in the other. That commands a great deal of respect from our staff if they know that their manager is willing to roll up her sleeves and get in the trenches right beside them.
Honestly, I haven’t had much experience with things that don’t work, he smiled. But I’ve seen managers arrive in the morning and make a beeline for the office and hole up in there most of the day, leaving the staff to fend for themselves. In my experience, a manager shouldn’t need to spend more than 20% of the time in the office (Ruskauff, 2008).
I had noticed so far that when he needed an impersonal pronoun, he used the feminine. I asked him about that, using it as a segue into my next line of questioning. His response was, “Habit. It’s political correctness that shouldn’t be overlooked” (Ruskauff, 2008). Then I asked him about some of the differences between male and female managers.
Sure, there are differences. Men have the tendency to want to solve every problem that they’re presented with as efficiently and quickly as possible. Women don’t necessarily want to solve it in such a forthright manner; they’re usually more diplomatic. They like to communicate more and elicit as many different opinions as possible and the solution usually surfaces within the discussion. Now, I’m generalizing almost to the point of absurdity, but that’s been my experience. At the end of the day, I think both men and women can learn a lot from each other regarding management styles (Ruskauff, 2008).
I was going to ask how much value his company places on technology, but one glance at the floor operations and that question would sound absurd. Since we were running out of time, I wanted to ask one final question, which was how much of his time was spent on strategy, and how much of his decision-making process was based on reaction.
“I like that question,” he said (Ruskauff, 2008).
Of course, there is a great deal of planning. We look historically at what the trends have been and we know with some certainty which seasons bring what kind of work. When school starts, we know that we are going to have a lot of labor intensive work for the students like paste-ups and so forth. We also need to be careful with what we’re copying out of textbooks for copyright purposes and we need to make sure everyone is trained on what answers we give some customers. We also know that in the spring, we get a lot of architectural work, as construction usually gears up around that time. But it’s very generalized. For the most part, it’s a crapshoot. We have to rely mostly on an extemporaneous management style and just take things as they come. We can’t get too caught up in what we’ve planned just because it’s what we’ve planned. Flexibility is the key (Ruskauff, 2008).
It didn’t take a long list of questions to see that Mr. Ruskauff runs a very efficient, productive and friendly office. After only watching the operations for fifteen minutes, one could see that what he said about his management style was true. He is a very macro-oriented manager who commands a deep, mutual respect from his staff.
Work Cited
Ruskauff, John. Personal interview. 29 Sept. 2008.
