Fuck, I was tired. That was the first and overwhelming thought I remember pouring through my brain. It was only the first day of the conference and I already felt exhausted. I put my face in my hands and tried to rub the fatigue out of my eyes.
I wondered what was going to happen. The situation with Caroline, with Amy and Wes Howard; I knew it was a major problem, but at that time I didn’t have any idea what could possibly be done about it. And then, unexpectedly, almost as if I was channelling her, I felt a sudden onrush of Susan’s fury coursing through my veins. It was the fury she had shown on her return from the education conference, where the problem that was Amy and Wes Howard had first revealed itself. For an instant I was as angry as she had been, my vision clouded by her desperate and wailing cry for justice. But just as quickly as Susan’s fury came it passed, and swelling up in its place was my own all-enveloping sense of foreboding fear. Fear that something awful was bound to happen, and that no one, least of all me, could do anything to stop it.
I looked at my watch. It was nine-thirty-six.
What quelled Susan’s fury and fed my own fear, I knew, was the memory of how Mary had reacted to Susan’s outrage. Where I could feel Susan’s anger, now as I did then, creeping in under my skin, raising the hair on the back of my neck, and compelling me towards some instinctive action, Mary, as she always seemed capable of being, had been simply cold, calm, and methodical. Despite Susan’s posture, a blustering dervish storming into her office, Mary, I remembered, had simply received the base information, pushed back on the accusations to test and understand them, and then decided on a direct course of action.
And what a decision it was. Susan had brought a problem named Wes Howard, but Mary had quickly and expertly turned it into a pair of problems named Amy Crawford and Caroline Abernathy. They were the ones who had acted inappropriately--disrespecting their supervisor and embarrassing the company in front of the clients it served. Susan, Mary had claimed, had no evidence of Wes’s misconduct, and therefore the smartest and safest thing to do was to discipline the employees who had been involved. Minutes later, a pair of meetings took place, Mary leaning heavily on Don Bascom to fire Amy and chew out Caroline.
I looked at my watch again. It was nine-thirty-eight.
I stood up. I was sweating. Wondering why it was so hot in the windowless room we had chosen as our staff office, I started pacing back and forth across the garish carpeting.
I saw the obvious parallel between that situation and the situation we were facing now. The scene was the same, only this time around, I realized with heart-skipping certainty, I had cast myself in the role of Susan Sanford. This time, it was me, not Susan, that had brought Mary the problem of Wes Howard and Amy Crawford. Did I really think Mary was going to do anything different this time? Why would she? The last time Wes caused trouble Mary pinned it on the involved staff. She would undoubtedly do so again. In fact, she may even gone out of her way to show me that was how she operated. What other reason was there for including me in both Amy’s termination and Caroline’s reprimand? I had no role to play in either meeting. Was that Mary’s attempt at a teachable moment? Was she coaching me? Showing me the way? Here, Alan. This is how we deal with problems around here. I felt my stomach drop to the floor as I realized that this might possibly be true.
At nine-forty-five I took out my cell phone and tried calling Mary. I listened to it ring four times and then her voicemail greeting kicked in. I hung up and tried redialing. This time it rang twice before the automated message picked up.
“Hello, this is Mary Walton. I can’t take your call right now, so please leave a message after the beep. I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.”
I hung up again. Where was she? Now she was almost twenty minutes late, and I had to be somewhere else at ten o’clock. If she didn’t come soon, I would miss her, and then who knows when we would have another opportunity to connect.
I stopped myself short. The fear I had just been feeling helped put another idea in my head. Maybe it would be better if Mary and I did miss each other. Mary had already proven that she was not interested in solving the actual problem of Wes Howard, focusing instead on whatever was needed in order to preserve the relationship with the client. She was willing to sacrifice the careers or well being of her staff people for that objective.
Was I? A flurry of questions went racing through my mind. Weren’t there some circumstances where a client’s behavior was so egregious, so illegal, so wrong, that the right decision was to sever that relationship and protect the young and underpaid professionals who had been victimized? Was this one of those cases? And if so, did I have the wherewithal to do something about it?
Then I thought suddenly about the values project that Mary had put me in charge of, the draft statements still living unrealized on a forlorn document on my laptop. They had not yet been presented to our staff as official, Mary wanting everyone to get successfully through this conference before doing so. But I had long since committed them to memory. I was proud of them, or at least proud of the process we had used to create them, but now, some of those simple sentence fragments seemed to mock me.
Shows initiative.
Anticipates challenges.
Creatively applies resources to solve problems.
These were among the things we agreed were necessary for success in our environment, attributes it would be necessary for our staff to demonstrate. And they weren’t handed down from above, dictates from the mysterious figure in the corner office. They were developed by the very people who would need to embrace them in order to make them real. They were words on a piece of paper, of course they were, but they were also something more. Mary could pick and choose which ones she liked and which ones she didn’t, but they, in whatever combination she was comfortable with, were something larger than even her. They had a power, latent now, but there, and present, ready to be tapped when we needed them.
And now I realized with embarrassment that I had failed to live up to them. With regard to the problem that was Wes Howard, from the moment Susan had fatalistically brought it to my attention, I had done exactly the opposite of what our draft values required of me. What had I done instead? I punted. I had simply deferred the necessary decisions to Mary Walton.
I looked at my watch again. It was nine-fifty-five, and I was still all alone in our forgotten staff office.
To hell with it, and to hell with Mary Walton. I had to get myself to my ten o’clock appointment, and after that, I was determined to start taking matters into my own hands.
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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.
Image Source
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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