This was a while before I got there, so I’m not sure who smiled on her and how she rose up through the ranks, but the year before I joined the company the business was sold by the guy who had founded it to a small group of employees who were going to run it as a kind of management team. Mary Walton was one of those employees—or “partners” as everyone soon came to call them. There were three in total. One guy was good at managing clients, the second guy was good at office operations, and Mary had the financial background they evidently needed to make this “management team” thing a go. She couldn’t have been more than thirty-five at the time, and I think had less than two years of supervisory experience.
Now, there’s two things you need to understand about Mary Walton if you’re going to try and help me make sense of what happened. First, she’s an accountant by training, and that means she’s been programmed to count everything. Dollars spent, hours worked, vacation days taken, coffee cups broken—you name it and Mary counted it, keeping track of everything on cramped little spreadsheets. That kind of attention-to-detail served her and the company well as long as she was the financial arm of the management team.
But about five years after I got there the partner who was in charge of client relations—a guy named Ryan Kettridge, someone who had a real talent for the people side of the business—well, he had some kind of nervous breakdown and wound up moving to New Mexico to chew peyote with the Indians or something. Instead of going out and hiring a real professional to take over his responsibilities, the remaining management team decided it would make more sense to move Mary into the client management role, and nurture one of the rising stars in the financial department to eventually take over her responsibilities there. They even made this rising star a junior partner in the organization. He was a nice enough guy, but like a lot of us, he was young, and wasn’t experienced enough to say no.
I still remember the day it happened. Young as I was, I was a department head back then, reporting directly to Ryan. I was expecting him back from one of his extended overseas trips that day, so I went looking for him in his office to give him a couple of project updates. Needless to say, he wasn’t there, but Mary was, and so was her remaining business partner—a guy named Don Bascom, who had about as much tact as a stampeding elephant. Mary and Don were huddled together in a hushed conversation over one of the corners of the conference table, a telephone and a scribble-filled legal pad between them. They both looked up at me when I appeared in the doorway, and their faces looked like I had just caught them doing something illegal.
“What is it, Alan?” I remember Don barking at me.
“I’m looking for Ryan,” I said. “Wasn’t he due back today?”
The two of them exchanged a pair of glances and then turned back to me.
“His trip was extended,” Don said curtly. “He’ll be gone for the rest of the week.”
Don was a pretty cool customer, and he had entirely masked whatever trepidation he had been feeling when I first appeared. Mary, however, still looked like someone had just woken her up and shined a flashlight in her face. Something was clearly wrong and I hesitated, lingering a little longer than I apparently should have in the office door. When Don got up and started coming over to me I wasn’t sure what to think. Was he coming to shake my hand? Pat me on the back? Knock me on my ass? With Don you could never be entirely sure. Instead he simply thanked me for stopping by and closed the door, pretty much right in my face.
I stood there for a few minutes and heard them muttering to each other, and then they placed a phone call to someone on speaker phone, but all the voices were too muffled for me to hear anything distinctly.
I found out later that Don and Mary called the leader of every client organization that day, letting them know what had happened to Ryan and telling them about Mary’s new position in the company. I had to rely on the grapevine to find that out, because there was never any official communication from the management team on the transition. There was no announcement, no memo, no staff meeting to let the hundred or so people who worked there know that they were all reporting to somebody new. Mary just started working out of the corner office and making the rounds at client meetings. And the name Ryan Kettridge was never spoken again.
It was an inauspicious beginning, and things never really got much better after that. In retrospect, I think the whole business was doomed from the start. Mary was an accountant. She had always been better with numbers than she had been with people. But now her job was people—managing them, motivating them, dealing with their ups and downs, getting them to work together for a common goal—and she was an abject failure at it. She tired, I’ll give her that much, she tried. But her attempts always seemed forced and calculated.
She bonded better with the client leaders than she did with the staff, and it wasn’t long before she started dressing like them and looking down her nose at everything the same way they did. She got along swimmingly with Eleanor, and rather quickly began decking herself out in all the same affectations. Franklin Planners, Mont Blanc pens, Coach briefcases, Ann Taylor business suits—Mary went out and got them all. But the more she tried to dress herself up for the big city, the more that small town vibe just seemed to shine on through.
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“Dragons” is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. For more information, go here.
This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.
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http://lres.com/heres-why-amcs-need-to-pay-close-attention-to-looming-regulatory-changes/businessman-in-the-middle-of-a-labyrinth/
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