The leadership meeting was the same one I had attended the year before, when I had first moved into my position as deputy executive. That’s the way things worked in the company and with the clients it served. Everything was on a slow slog of an annual cycle, with the same events happening again and perpetually, with only the glacial pace of the volunteers changing positions in the leadership ranks there to provide some variety and a fresh set of political challenges.
If you remember, Eleanor chaired the meeting a year ago. She did that in her then-capacity as President-elect of her organization. That meant that the chair for the upcoming meeting was the current President-elect of the organization. And who might that be, you ask?
None other than Paul Webster.
By that time I had already had several conversations with him -- all of them before my recent run-in with Gerald. As President-elect, one of his functions was to review and confirm the leadership and rosters for the hundred or so committees that made up the byzantine structure of their organization. Like so many, it was an annual ritual, the President-elect making sure his or her hand-picked supporters were in any position that was vacant, and making sure the appropriate bonds could be forged with those who would statutorily continue into the President-elect’s term as President. My job was to make sure he had an accurate report of all the committees, to accept all his changes, to coax those changes into our membership database, and then to coordinate the appropriate invitations to the leadership meeting he would be chairing.
Fortunately, with just two weeks to go before the meeting, most of that work had already been done, and now I was corresponding daily with some portion on the one hundred and thirty-nine people that had been invited, making sure that they had the information they needed to make their travel arrangements and, shortly, that they had received the agenda materials that had been prepared for them.
There were still several pieces of information I needed from Paul before that final task could be completed, but I knew better than to contact him without speaking to Mary first.
“Mary,” I said, leaning into her office the day after Gerald had been pushed out. “I need to contact Paul Webster about the agenda for the leadership meeting.”
Mary was sitting at her desk, her fingers busy on her keyboard, but she stopped and spun on me like I had caught her cheating on a test. “Oh, Christ, you didn’t call him, did you?”
“No,” I said. “But I need to.”
“Don and I haven’t spoken to him, yet,” she said, somewhat frantically. “You had better wait until we do that.”
“I know,” I said. “Or, at least, that’s what I suspected.”
“You’ll have to wait,” she said, very much like she couldn’t hear me over the torrent of thoughts running through her brain. “We have a call set-up for two o’clock this afternoon. You need to wait at least until then.”
“Sure, no problem,” I said, backing away. “I’ll hold until you tell me it’s safe to reach out to him.”
As I left I almost bumped into Ruthie, who was waiting for me to leave so that she could shut Mary’s door.
“Is she all right?” I asked.
Ruthie gave me a quizzical look, like I had asked for something nonsensical. “She’s fine. She just has a busy schedule today.”
I nodded and went back to my office, knowing that there were a thousand other things I could keep myself busy with until two o’clock that afternoon.
One of those things was a meeting with the department heads -- our number reduced down to six with Susan, Michael, and now Gerald sacrificed on Mary’s increasingly bloody altar of concentrating productivity. Bethany was the only one who remained who was my direct report. The others -- motherly Peggy Wilcox over Human Resources, closeted Scott Nelson over Accounting, pallid Jurgis Pavlov over IT, and hydrant-like Angie Ferguson over Meeting Planning -- they all reported either to Mary or Don. The meeting was about as focused as all those intersecting lines of authority would suggest.
Our agenda included the upcoming leadership meeting, which everyone should have had a stake in. Bethany and I were trying to organize the agenda with Paul Webster and all the various committee chairs -- stalled until Mary gave me the go-ahead to contact him. Scott reported out on the latest variances of actuals versus budget -- none of which had changed since the last time we had come together. Jurgis talked about the latest patch to our membership database -- which hadn’t been in place in time for us to coordinate all the appointments and invitations through it, forcing use to rely on our own tracking spreadsheet and word processing documents. Angie had everything lined up with the luxury hotel hosting the event -- and knew there was nothing more substantial to do until we reached 72 hours out and the final catering numbers had to be confirmed. And Peggy? Peggy did everything she could to keep silent, knowing that her only contribution would be reassigning some staff to help with the logjam, which she was prohibited from doing by both Mary and Don.
They meant well. At least I think they did. Well, all except Scott Nelson, who I couldn’t stop seeing as Mary’s spy. But meaning well or not, it was clear that they were all focused on the political intrigues besieging their own fiefdoms, and were reluctant to come together under any kind of shared purpose that I dared to define.
When it was over I asked Bethany to stay behind. She had seemed unusually uncomfortable during the meeting, and I wanted to make sure she wasn’t hiding some even bigger surprise. Unfortunately, she was.
“It’s Wes Howard,” she said after getting up to close the conference room door that the departing crew had left open. “He’s causing trouble again.”
“Oh, god,” I said uncontrollably. “What now?”
Wes had been appointed to lead one of the most influential committees and, as such, he was a key player in deciding which topics would get discussed at the upcoming leadership meeting. Bethany had drawn the short straw and was working with him to confirm those details and get the right communications out to the right people.
“I think he’s trying to sabotage me, Alan,” she said, sitting down in the chair next to mine. “Like he did with Susan. He’s nitpicking everything I do. He even yelled at me over the phone yesterday. Told me I was an idiot.”
Tears welled up in Bethany’s eyes and she choked back a sob. I reached out and put a reassuring hand over hers.
“Hey, hey,” I said, “It’s okay. Don’t let that asshole get to you.”
Bethany composed herself, pulling her hand out from under mine so that she could carefully wipe away tears without ruining her mascara.
“I know,” she said, more confidently. “I know he’s just trying to get under my skin, but he’s talking to other people, too. I think he’s calling several people on my team and telling them what he thinks of me.”
This seemed especially outrageous, even for someone like Wes, so I asked Bethany to elaborate. She said that one of her team members -- a twenty-something named Tammy -- was late coming to one of their team meetings last week, and when Bethany went to go investigate she found Tammy on the phone with Wes.
“He was filling her head with all kinds of lies about me,” Bethany said.
“Like what?”
“I’d rather not say,” Bethany replied. “But I heard them. Tammy was obviously trapped, not wanting to talk to him anymore, but unable to get off the phone. I motioned for her to put him on speaker phone and I heard some of what he was saying.”
I looked at her as if I expected her to go on, but she didn’t oblige. “Bethany,” I said as gently as I could. “What kind of things is he saying about you? If you want me to do something about it I’m going to need you to be specific.”
I tacked that last sentence on almost without thinking, but it was the one that Bethany had the strongest reaction to.
“Oh, Alan! I’m not expecting you to do anything about it. There’s nothing you can do about it.”
That set me back in my chair. The reason my comment of doing something came off so thoughtlessly was, of course, that it was empty. Whatever Wes was saying, however vile or untrue, there was nothing I would be able to do about it. I knew that, and that’s why my words felt so hollow. But clearly, Bethany knew that, too. She knew that there was nothing I could do about anything that went wrong in the company. Our experience together at Club NOW had proven that.
I gave Bethany a bemused look. “Well, I’m sorry. I wish there was something I could do about it. People like Wes Howard should be banished from polite society.”
Bethany smiled, and this time placed a reassuring hand on mine. “It’s okay. I just wanted you to know that he was causing trouble. We’ll be seeing him again at the leadership meeting.”
There was something in the way she looked at me, a strange mixture of affection and disappointment, that made me charge down an unpremeditated path.
“Bethany, can I ask you something?”
“Of course,” she said, pulling her hand back.
“Gerald said some things about me in…, in his…, in the tantrum he threw when Don was firing him. I think he’s crazy, but I haven’t been able to get them out of my mind since Mary told me about them. I’m worried that they might actually be true.”
Bethany shrunk away, folding her hands in her lap. “What did he say?”
The words were on the tip of my tongue but they suddenly felt like the most dangerous words I could possibly utter. Once out, I realized, they would never be able to be brought back. They would be out forever.
“He said I was in over my head. That I was not up to the responsibilities of my position. That I had lost the trust of my team members. That they knew they couldn’t count on me.”
I looked at Bethany and she looked back at me in silence for several uncomfortable moments. I struggled to read the expression on her face, desperate to find something like incredulity or compassion manifest there. But try as I might, her stoicism seemed absolute, perpetual, eternal.
“Do you think any of that is true?” I asked.
“No,” Bethany said after only the shortest of perceptible pauses. “I think there are people here who are out to get you, who want to see you fail, but I don’t think those things about you, and I know plenty of others who don’t as well.”
I smiled, but Bethany did not smile back. If anything, she looked more uncomfortable than ever, far more distressed than how she appeared before telling me about Wes Howard’s hijinks. I thought briefly of the difficult position I had put her in -- I mean, what would anyone say if their boss laid that kind of doubt and fear on them -- and decided to chalk it up to that. The idea that she might be lying to me didn’t even cross my mind.
“Okay,” I said. “Thank you. I appreciate that vote of confidence.”
“Uh huh,” Bethany said, quickly excusing herself and leaving the room.
+ + +
“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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