Dragons - Part III

1

It took me a few days to coordinate everyone’s schedules, but I was eventually able to bring the department heads together to begin what we would come to call the Staff Qualities Project.

Now, when I say department heads I mean the folks who had overall responsibility for each of the company’s functional units -- Communications, Human Resources, Information Technology -- things like that. Getting them all together was more difficult than it may sound, because in the complicated hierarchy of the company, some of the ‘heads’ reported to me and some of them didn’t.

The company had twenty or so clients back then, and either Mary or Don personally served as the account executive for each of them, unwilling to relinquish that kind of control to anyone else. Most of the clients were fairly small, and could easily be managed in just a few hours a week, but one of Mary’s clients was huge, with far more programs than any of the others. To help her with this burden, she had created a deputy executive role for that client -- the only one like it in the company -- and that was the job I had recently been promoted to. With this structure it wasn’t clear whether the department heads were above, below, or at my level. And it didn’t help that some of the heads actually reported to me, but most of them reported directly to either Mary or Don.

Look, if you want me to I can draw a map of all the solid and dashed lines that made up our stupid organizational chart. In all the years I worked there, I was never able to explain this to someone and have it make sense to them on the first try. I always felt like I needed to provide one of those character maps that accompanied some of Shakespeare’s political tragedies -- you know, something you could refer back to when cousins, stepbrothers, and adopted sons started bumping each other off to keep clear on who was next in line for the throne. But for our purposes it’s probably not critical that you understand all these connections in detail. Suffice it to say this was not a group of people I could bring together on a moment’s notice. Although I had been put in charge of the project, I wasn’t in a position to just call a meeting and get it going. In many cases I had to ask politely and drop Mary’s name in order to get a commitment to attend.

The group I was finally able to assemble comprised seven individuals -- eight, including myself. There would have been nine of us if we had come together before Susan’s resignation, but by then I was already wearing Susan’s hat as well as mine. Three of these folks I’ve already mentioned. Peggy Wilcox was there as our director of Human Resources, as was Bethany Bishop and Gerald Krieger, the two people I described trading timesheet war stories with back when Mary first took over the company. Oh, and one other person I guess I mentioned before, but not by name. That would be Scott Nelson, the guy they tapped to take over the Accounting department after Mary moved from there to the President’s office. The three other people were Jurgis Pavlov, the cadaverous Russian immigrant who ran our IT department, Angie Ferguson, a hard-nosed and bullet-shaped woman who negotiated all our vendor contracts, and Michael Lopez, who headed up our Communications department.

If ever there was a project designed with Michael Lopez in mind, it had to be the Staff Qualities. He was a young guy -- like a lot of us, not yet forty -- athletic and hungry. He had worked for some big clients at a couple of PR agencies before coming to us. He was good at what he did, and he knew it. Somewhere in between workouts he had gotten an MBA -- something that had endeared him to Mary, who loved nothing more than a staff with a bunch of little initials after their names. Michael had a knack for branding, a good eye for design, and wrote by far the best ad copy of anyone in the company. He could sell you your own shoes and you’d walk away feeling that you’d gotten him to give you the best possible price. But what he thought he did best, the strength he thought would really help our project the most, was his ability to brainstorm.

Gerald had another word for it. It also began with a B.

“Alan,” he had told me when I had invited him to come to the meeting. “If this is another one of those make-work projects that gives Michael a platform from which to spew his bullshit, so help me…”

I sympathized. Brainstorming was like a drug to Michael, and like a ballplayer doped up on steroids, when ideas started getting bandied about the imitation mahogany table, he’d wind up taking bigger and bigger risks, talking more and more out of his ass, looking for that elusive prize that would allow him to both solve the problem and take all the credit for it. 

“No, this is serious,” I had told Gerald, choosing to address his concern about make-work rather than promising to rein Michael in. “Mary wants us to come up with a draft. It has to be in place before we start hiring to fill Susan’s position.”

Secretly, I was happy Michael had so readily agreed. In the days it had taken me to get the group together I had spent some time thinking about what Mary had asked me to do, and despite Jenny’s pessimism about it, I had come to see it as a real opportunity to make some positive change in the organization. I was still upset over the way Susan had been treated, feeling that her supportive and inclusive management style was something the company desperately needed. If we could somehow define that as the standard for the organization, and then begin hiring people based on that standard, I thought we might actually have an impact on the company’s miserable and soul-crushing culture. And although I had a clear understanding of what I wanted to do, even as we assembled in the conference room for our first meeting, I wasn’t sure how much of that I should reveal to the department heads, or how we were possibly going to get there.

But Michael was quick to volunteer an idea.

“Why don’t we just start listing off all the attributes we think are necessary for success in the company?”

“What?” I asked.

“Sure,” Michael said. “We’ve all worked here long enough to know the kind of people we’re looking for. Let’s just start throwing out some ideas. We can edit them later.”

I looked around and tried to quickly assess everyone’s initial reaction to the idea. They had greeted me with a whole lot of silence after I had introduced our task a few minutes before, so I was hopeful that Michael’s suggestion would be accepted as a way of getting the discussion flowing. Gerald, of course, was feeding me a scowl, but I judged that everyone else appeared either willing or indifferent to the proposal.

“Come on,” Michael said, getting out of his padded chair and taking up a position beside the flipchart standing like an unknown soldier in the corner of the room. “I’ll get it started.” He uncapped one of the markers and quickly began writing across the top of the paper. “A successful staff person is someone who…” he said as he wrote, pausing a moment to underline the title and placing a bullet point before his first contribution, “…shows initiative.”

Michael turned back to the group, the anticipatory twinkle of his next fix already in his eye. “Who’s next?” His dress shirt was open one button past the collar and I could see the slim gold chain he wore around his neck. “Bethany, how about you? When you think about the qualities of a successful staff person, what comes to mind?”

We all turned our attention towards Bethany, someone I thought Michael had correctly perceived as more enthusiastic than apathetic.

“Ummm…” she said, crinkling her misshapen nose and biting her lower lip, looking like a child trying to decide which flavored toothpaste to get at the dentist. “…supports the mission of the organization?”

She sounded uncertain but Michael accepted it readily. “Good,” he said, writing her idea quickly on the flipchart. “What else?”

“Completes assignments on time,” Angie said, as usual, her voice just a little louder than it needed to be.

Michael nodded, his marker squeaking its way across the paper.

Several more ideas came in quick succession. Jurgis thought the ideal staff person should be able to “solve problems.” Peggy thought they should be a “team player.” The momentum was starting to build and I decided it was safe for me to contribute an idea of my own -- something I hoped would start steering us in the direction I wanted to go.

“Thinks creatively,” I said, oddly satisfied to see several approving nods around the table. Bethany especially beamed at me, as if I had read her very mind.

“Excellent,” Michael said, as he worked to stay with the flow. “Let’s keep it going. What else?”

But despite this encouragement, a sudden silence filled the room. 

“Come on, now,” Michael said, turning to face us with his eyes darting about like a quarterback in a huddle. “Who hasn’t said something yet? Gerald, how about you? A successful staff person is someone who…”

“…kisses Mary’s ass.”

It was like hitting a brick wall at sixty miles an hour. Gerald’s hostile tone was startling, but not as much as the way everyone else in the room shut down and turned guardedly toward me. If I’d thought I could let Michael run this meeting, I’d just discovered my mistake.

“Gerald,” I said. “Come on, be serious.”

“I am serious, Alan. With all the other tripe you’re putting up there, you might as well just cut to the chase and save us a lot of time.”

“Gerald,” Michael said, his muscles twitching nervously under his shirt. “We’re brainstorming. You’re not supposed to criticize other ideas when brainstorming.”

Gerald ignored Michael’s reprimand. “Look, Alan,” he said, speaking to me as if he and I were the only two people in the room, “you told me this wasn’t going to be another make-work exercise. Exactly what is it you think we can accomplish with this?”

Gerald was being less hostile, but his question was still a direct threat. Everyone knew he was a kind of lone wolf, notorious for his boldness and his ability to get away with things no one else could -- like not showing up for meetings unless he thought they were worth his time. The last thing I needed was to have him openly boycotting this process.

“I thought I stated that fairly clearly at the beginning of the meeting,” I said assertively, not trying to intimidate him, but at least hold my own in the eyes of the others. “We need to identify the qualities most associated with success in the company.”

“Why?”

Because Mary wants us to. That was the response that came immediately to my mind, but I chomped it back, knowing instinctively it wouldn’t serve my purpose. Mary was the club I had used to bring this group together -- her desire to see this project done -- but I had to be careful not to tie Mary too closely to our effort. No one liked Mary. That was universal. But most people in the company were also afraid of her, including, I knew, several of those sitting around our table. If I wanted them to help me re-invent the company’s culture, I had to keep Mary’s name out of this as much as possible. In a way, I knew Gerald was right. No one was going to contribute any revolutionary ideas as long as her spirit was floating over us.

But right now I had a bigger issue to deal with. Out of the corners of my eyes I could see everyone looking at me skeptically, like a pack of young dogs eyeing the aging alpha male, curious to see how I was going to handle Gerald’s open defiance.

“Because we’ll use those qualities to help us screen new candidates for employment,” I told him calmly, and then I said, with sudden passion, using my body language to dismiss Gerald and reach out to all the others around the table, “Look. Don’t you see what a tremendous opportunity this is? Let’s assume we are able to come up with this list of traits, these qualities that define the ideal staff person for the company. It doesn’t have to be a list that describes any existing individual. I’m not looking to enshrine anyone who currently works here as the model we should all aspire to. It’ll be an amalgam of all the best traits of all the best people who have worked here over the years. Once we have that list in hand, HR can start using it to screen applicants. The people they hire will by definition be closer to that ideal standard than they have been before.”

I glanced over at Peggy at the mention of her department and was rewarded with a motherly nod. Encouraged, I went on with even more excitement. “And what if we all start using the same list to conduct our personnel evaluations? Those who strive to embody the traits will be rewarded. Bit by bit, hire by hire, evaluation by evaluation -- we’ll start affecting the very culture of this organization, transforming it into something better aligned for success.”

I waited, looking anxiously from face to face, trying to determine who was with me and who wasn’t. Some folks liked working there, but most didn’t -- and I was gambling that the majority would be willing to try and change things if they could.

“It sounds great, Alan,” Gerald said softly, tipping himself back in his chair and studying me through the lenses of his designer eyeglasses. “It really does. But what about Mary?”

Like a flash I knew I had to tackle this head on. “What about her?” I shot back, before the mention of her name could suck all the energy out of the room.

“Is she on board with all of this?”

“Why wouldn’t she be?” I said. “She asked me to lead the project, didn’t she? If we do this right, all we’re going to do is make her company more successful and more competitive. Why would she be opposed to that?”

There was a long silence as Gerald and I sat looking at each other, broken only by the sound of Michael repeatedly removing the cap of the flipchart marker and snapping it back into place. The pause gave me ample opportunity to replay the words I had just spoken in my mind and wonder where the hell they had come from. Did Gerald just do that to me? Did he just maneuver me into making a promise only Mary could deliver on? I did the best I could to keep the doubt I was feeling out of the expression on my face, knowing that Gerald and I were playing a kind of chicken and the one who looked less sure of himself was going to lose.

“Well, I’m in,” Bethany said suddenly, and when I turned towards her I found her eyes looking at me warmly. “Let’s give it a shot.”

“Me, too,” Michael quickly added, still standing in the corner and looking a little disappointed that he hadn’t had anything to write down in the last few minutes. 

I looked at some of the other faces in the room. I knew I hadn’t won yet. Any one of them could sink me by splashing cold water on the project the way Gerald had. But if they were all willing to follow me, then maybe together we could convince Gerald to play nice.

“Scott, what about you?” I asked, thinking he was the biggest wild card of those who remained uncommitted. He was a quiet one around the office -- small and slight and almost certainly closeted. But as Mary’s hand-picked successor as the head of the Accounting department, it was generally assumed he did most of his talking in Mary’s office, reporting back on almost everything he heard. As usual, he hadn’t yet said a word in our meeting.

“Sounds good to me,” he said. “Let’s see where this thing goes.”

“Angie?”

“Count me in.”

“Peggy?” My heart quavered just a bit as I realized she was even more a direct line back to Don as Scott was thought to be to Mary.

“I love this idea.”

“Jurgis?”

“Da.”

I turned back to Gerald, a smile tickling the corners of my lips, no longer fearing the inside straight he was trying to build because I had a full house arrayed against him. He was still tipped back in his chair, his fingers steepled in front of his face. In a moment, he allowed his chair to fall forward and he placed his elbows confidently on the table.

“Okay,” he said. “But if we’re going to do this thing, let’s do it right.”

2

Behaviors. That’s what Gerald meant by doing this thing right. He called the stuff we were putting up on the flipchart little more than descriptive nonsense -- things that sounded good to the brainless automatons that sat in most corporate conference rooms, but didn’t really mean anything, that had no substance to them. He even branded my idea that way -- was bold enough, in fact, to use it as an example for the rest of the group.

Thinks creatively, he said. What exactly does that mean? How can you tell if someone is thinking creatively? Does their forehead glow a certain color? And if we’re going to use that as a test for hiring new employees, how can we test their ability to think creatively in an interview setting? Ask them to answer the questions through interpretative dance? Gerald said we need to dump all this junk and start focusing on observable behaviors. After all, we didn’t want people who could describe themselves as creative thinkers. We wanted people who could be observed applying creative solutions in difficult situations.

Despite his patronizing tone, he actually made a lot of sense. We spent a few more minutes brainstorming in this new direction -- Michael back in his glory and stationed like a tactical wing commander beside his flipchart, but only about half of our ideas met Gerald’s rigid criteria. Someone would say “stays organized” and Gerald would counter with “keeps an orderly workspace.” Another would say “pursues professional development” and Gerald would correct it with “belongs to a professional society.” Michael bristled every time he did this, but everyone could see that Gerald was right, and that he was making our list better by pushing things in a direction they needed to go.

Whether it was Gerald’s condescending attitude and our own inability to swim in the depths he sought, our brainstorming died a fairly quick and natural death. Looking at the list we had on the flipchart -- a mishmash of descriptions and behaviors with little rhyme or reason to them -- I found myself unsatisfied with the output. I suggested that we all keep thinking about it, focusing on things that are directly observable and sending the ideas back to me over the next week via email. While the iron was hot I asked everyone to pull out their calendars and we set a time for a follow-up discussion.

Back in my office I taped our single sheet of flipchart paper to the wall and reflected on the progress we had made. Part of me thought about reporting to Mary -- to give her an update on what had happened and get her thoughts on how to proceed -- but eventually I decided against it. We didn’t have much to show for our efforts, true, but looking at Michael’s sloppy block printing and thinking about the way I had managed to get Gerald engaged in the discussion, I felt like something was beginning to build beneath the surface -- something profound, in its own way -- and I didn’t want Mary to kill it before we could give it life.

I evidently wasn’t the only one on whom the meeting had made an impression. Shortly after it ended I received a visit from Michael. He came in, closed the door, and took a seat in the sole visitor’s chair in my tiny office -- a cheap, molded plastic thing like you might see in a high school cafeteria. I had to turn in my desk chair to face him, and when I did our knees were almost touching.

“Why is Gerald such an asshole?”

I shrugged. It was one of those questions Michael had a knack for asking -- one whose answer contained no wisdom. Michael was never interested in learning anything, only in reinforcing his own myopic view of the world around him.

“He’s old,” I replied jokingly. “He can’t help it. If he didn’t have this job he’d probably be shambling around the park talking to himself.”

Michael did not appear amused. “I’m serious, Alan. He was disruptive in that meeting. And he treated everyone with disrespect. You should’ve called him out for it.”

That was another of Michael’s tiresome habits, offering advice when none was sought. 

“It’s all right, Michael. I didn’t mind. I want people to challenge my ideas. You do it all the time. Gerald just does it with less tact.”

“Well, I’m tired of his bullshit,” Michael said bitterly, his anger rising quickly and uncontrolled to the surface. “He’s a smug son of a bitch and he treats everyone like they’re pieces of human garbage. He’s got no right to do that. Just because Mary lured him away from that Fortune 500 company he came from, he thinks he’s untouchable and can treat everyone else like shit. He doesn’t know half as much as he thinks he does.”

When Michael was angry he usually swore a great deal, and would go on swearing for as long as you let him, never seeming to get any satisfaction out of the curse words.

“Didn’t his suggestion make sense?” I asked.

Michael looked at me angrily, clearly unwilling to give his adversary any credit. “He didn’t have to talk to us the way he did. I don’t know about anyone else, but I’m going to speak to him. He owes us a fucking apology.”

“Good luck with that,” I said, knowing that Michael would do no such thing and that, if he did, Gerald was likely to punch him in the nose, bulging biceps be damned.

I saw some movement through the glass pane in my door and looked up to see Bethany standing there. Needing a break from Michael I waved her inside. She cracked open the door and poked her head in.

“Am I interrupting?”

“Not at all. Come on in.”

Michael gave me a hurt look, almost as if I had invited a more popular girl to sit next to me at the lunch table, but I knew he wouldn’t say anything about it. Not to me, at least. Someone else, I knew, would get a full dose of his fury later.

Bethany came in and shut the door. There wasn’t a third chair for her so both Michael and I stood.

“Did you come to complain about Gerald, too?” Michael asked.

“What?” Bethany said.

“Gerald,” Michael said. “You know, Mister King Shit. The one who knows more than everyone else combined?”

Bethany gave me a confused look.

I shook my head. “Don’t listen to him. He’s just upset that Gerald stole the meeting away from me before he could.”

I meant it as a joke, but when I saw Michael turn purple I knew I had stepped over the line. He sputtered a few times, trying to find the words to express himself, but eventually gave up and stormed out of the room. I hurried after him, not to catch him but just to keep him from slamming the door. I was only partially successful.

“What was that all about?”

I sighed and motioned for her to take a seat. “Nothing. Or exactly what I just said, but I guess I shouldn’t have said it so bluntly.”

“Do you want to go talk to him?”

“No,” I said as we both sat down. “I’ll apologize later. I’d rather give him some time to calm down first.”

“Well, I don’t think either Gerald or Michael stole that meeting away from you. I think you ran it just fine.”

“Thanks.”

“No, I mean it. I’m really excited about this project and I’m glad you’re in charge of it, Alan. I really like the things you said about changing the culture of the company. I want to help in any way I can.”

“Well, I appreciate that,” I said. “I think the best thing we can all do right now is come up with some observable behaviors that describe the kind of person we’re looking for.”

Bethany nodded. “I agree. I’m going to give it some thought tonight and bring you my best ideas in the morning.”

“Tonight?”

“Yeah,” Bethany said. “It’s my night off. One night a week David takes care of feeding Parker and putting him to bed so I can have some time away. I usually go out with some friends or go read a book in a coffee shop, but I’d rather work on this.”

At the mention of her husband I glanced down at her wedding ring, a modest silver band with two inlaid diamonds and a center stone too small for the prongs that surrounded it. They had been married less than three years and their baby, Parker, had been born about six months ago. Parker had gone straight into daycare as soon as they would take him so Bethany could come back to work -- the same daycare, despite the cost, that Mary had sent her kids to.

“Don’t do that,” I told her. “Go out and have fun like you normally do. I’m giving everybody a week to get their ideas in. You don’t need to spend your free time on this.”

“Oh, I don’t mind,” Bethany said. “I really don’t. I could use a break from my friends. And this is important. I want to make sure we do this right.”

I nodded. I was hoping for some enthusiasm around this project, but this felt a little like overkill. Bethany was known in the company for her eagerness to please, always looking for an opportunity to impress the next rung up the ladder. It was probably one of the reasons she had climbed so far at such a young age. She was not yet thirty.

“Maybe once all the comments are in, you and I could sit down and go through them?”

Bethany’s tone was innocent -- overly so, I thought. I didn’t respond verbally to her suggestion but my skeptical thoughts must have shown on my face because she quickly started backpedaling.

“I mean, if you think you could use the help in organizing them. There’s sure to be a lot of different ideas. I’m just interested in helping any way I can.”

I let a couple of heartbeats go by. “I’ll let you know,” I said.

“Okay,” she said cheerfully, standing up and evidently deciding to depart before she dug herself in any deeper. “I’ll talk to you tomorrow, then.”

I watched her depart, self-consciously observing her slim frame, and found myself thinking about how Jenny had never entirely lost the pregnancy weight she had gained with Jacob. They say breast-feeding is supposed to help women slim down after delivery, but I’m not sure I believe it. Jenny exclusively nursed Jacob until he was eight months old -- the boy never deigned to take a bottle from me -- but she was unable to shed those extra pounds. And yet the office seemed filled with young professional women like Bethany, who were able to step back into their size six business skirts the day they returned to work, after ardently bottle feeding their babies for six weeks to make sure they were ready for daycare.

Suddenly, the phone rang.

“Hello?”

“Hello, Alan?”

“Yes.”

“Alan, this is Eleanor Rumford. How are you today?”

Eleanor Rumford. The woman next in line to chair the board of directors of the client I worked for. I had last seen her at the VIP meeting I had attended, when we sat at the same banquet table together and I had watched Mary fawn over her and tell her how right she was. Distracted by the events of the day, I couldn’t imagine why she was calling me.

“I’m fine, Eleanor. How are you?”

“Good. I was just sitting here reviewing the final program proof Susan had sent me and I thought I should give you a call.”

Of course. Our national education conference was coming up in a few weeks, and the proof she was referring to was a catalog that listed all the presentations and speakers for that event. Eleanor was chairing the planning committee and had been working closely with Susan on those details prior to her resignation.

“Yes,” I said, “I’m glad you did,” trying to sound as if I had been intending to call her myself. “How’s it looking?”

“Not very well. The document is riddled with mistakes.”

“Really?” I said, trying to mask my surprise. Susan had shown me the program before sending it to Eleanor. I hadn’t proofread every page, but thought it had been in pretty good shape.

“Yes, really. There are mistakes here that I asked to have corrected in the last draft. And there are also entirely new mistakes in areas that I had previously reviewed and approved. It takes a great deal of my time to review this material. I need to be able to trust that my edits will be made correctly and that pages which have been approved will not be tampered with. Can you understand my concern?”

“Yes, absolutely,” I said, my mind racing and wondering how things could have gone so far afield. But it was clear from Eleanor’s terseness that my primary focus now had to be on confidence building. “Can you email me your list of corrections? I’m sure there’s still time to fix things before the program goes to the printer.”

There was an odd silence on the other end of the line -- or not so much a silence as a pregnant pause in which a deep exhalation of breath could be heard.

“There are really too many corrections for me to type them up in an email. I’ve marked the pages Susan sent me with my red pen. I’m overnighting them to you so you can see exactly what needs to be corrected.”

“That’ll work, too,” I said quickly. “Do you want our FedEx account number?” I had learned long ago that when something was broken it was best to take as much of the repair cost as you could off the customer.

“No,” Eleanor said. “Thank you, but that won’t be necessary. Look, Alan,” she said, softening her tone just a smidge, as if recognizing I wasn’t going to climb into the trap unless there was something sweet inside. “I know that Susan left you in a bit of a lurch, but these items simply must be attended to. I need you to take personal responsibility for this. Can you do that for me?”

“Yes, of course,” I said with as much false enthusiasm as I could muster. “I would be happy to. I’m sorry things got so messed up, but I’ll get them right before the conference begins.”

“I know you will. There’s a lot riding on this conference.”

“There certainly is.”

The line clicked off and I held the telephone receiver in my hand for a few moments before putting it back in its cradle.

“There certainly is,” I said again to myself. “For her and me both.”

3

In many ways, the call from Eleanor was indicative of my work life at that time. There was never any shortage of masters to serve in that organization, and they all seemed to want a piece of me -- always needing me to do something for them in order to make themselves look good. Now with Susan gone, I was effectively working two jobs and as a result I had twice as many masters as normal. With some kind of transition time between Bethany’s visit and Eleanor’s phone call, I probably would have had the presence of mind to stall Eleanor off. But I was too schooled in the company’s business model of yes to do anything except cheerfully take on the additional burden. I was a sap.

Let me tell you a quick story. Shortly after I got promoted to deputy account executive, Don and Mary held one of their “state of the company” meetings. These were opportunities to bring the entire staff together and share non-binding information about company objectives. In theory, they were a good idea. Everyone who worked there was siloed in their individual departments, and there was never enough direction from the top to demonstrate that we were all on the same team. Unfortunately, neither Don nor Mary was especially committed to these quarterly affairs and, as a result, they usually happened about twice a year, and only after someone with some influence began asking for one.

This one was especially memorable for me. Because of my recent promotion I had been trying to think a little more strategically about what I did for a living. Where once I had simply done as I was told because I trusted those above me to lead us to success, I realized I had now reached the position where that responsibility would fall squarely to me. Anticipating needs and working proactively within company policies to provide the services necessary for true client satisfaction -- that was my job; said so on the new position description I had signed. But I wasn’t really sure how I was going to do it. So, when the meeting agenda was circulated and I saw DEFINING OUR VALUE PROPOSITION in big bold letters across the top of the page, I was hoping to get a few ideas.

I remember the multi-purpose room was already packed when I got there. There were about a hundred and fifty employees in the company back then and there weren’t nearly enough chairs for everyone. The room was used for training and other large projects, and had a lot of modular furniture, which had been arranged in a tremendous U-shape along three walls, a row of chairs set immediately before a row of long, narrow tables. It was the only way to accommodate everyone, and like the good little sheeple we were, we had sorted ourselves according to size, the shorter folks sitting in the chairs, the medium size people sitting behind them on the tables, and the tallest employees standing in the back. It created a kind of amphitheater effect, as if Mary and Don were rehearsing for an upcoming tour on the dinner theater circuit.

And when they appeared it was like performers on a stage, bounding into the room like the hosts of one of those old variety shows, bursting with enthusiasm to tell their waiting audience about all the great acts they had waiting in the wings. I know that this was, in fact, a performance for them, something they needed to rehearse and psych themselves up for. Neither one of them was naturally gifted at this kind of thing. It was probably one of the reasons they always waited for everyone to be assembled before making their appearance. Having to mingle with the masses before delivering their practiced talking points was likely to throw them off their game.

I won’t go into too many specifics about what was said. These meetings tended to drone on with friendly platitudes and soft focus PowerPoint slides -- a formula guaranteed to lull even the most restless agitator to sleep -- but true to their agenda they did spend a few minutes talking about what they perceived as the company’s value proposition -- what made it different in world of similar organizations providing similar services.

Here’s what Don said. I remember it precisely because I wrote it down on the legal pad I was balancing on my knee. He said the company had a sense of institutional presence for its client organizations -- a responsibility that transcended the individual desires of the client volunteers. From this perspective, the company was the steward of the very social purpose of each organization it served, with accountability for the fulfillment of its organizational vision.

That probably doesn’t mean anything to you -- just more of that corporate gobbledygook. But it actually meant a lot to me, because in those words, I heard Don describe exactly the kind of company I wanted to work for. Our business was turning vision into reality, but that vision wasn’t some boilerplate slogan about maximizing shareholder value. The vision I focused on was that of my client organization -- a nonprofit whose mission was focused on making positive changes in the lives of real people. That was why I had come to work for the company in the first place and now, a dozen disappointing years later, in the most unlikely of settings, I found myself shamelessly re-inspired by words Don Bascom had memorized from one of the pages in his bulging policy binders. 

And then Mary opened her mouth, and with every word she spoke I felt my spirit plummet back into cynicism and frustration. I think she thought she was agreeing with Don, but the words coming out of her mouth were in direct opposition to the vision he had just described. The company’s value proposition, she said, was best realized when we kept the volunteer leaders of our client organizations happy, when we delivered a service level that surpassed their expectations, and when we showed them how much we loved working for them.

Now hold that thought and let’s fast forward to the day after my phone call with Eleanor Rumford. As promised, the overnight package from her office arrived. I don’t know what I was expecting after her dire warning the previous day, but nothing could have prepared me for what I found inside. Not just every page but practically every line of the program had been corrected in the red ink of Eleanor’s small and precise handwriting.

Some things were legitimate typos. Others I could fairly chalk up to her prerogative as planning committee chair. But so much more seemed purely stylistic in nature. She had reordered paragraphs and re-worded sentences -- not to correct false information or add essential details -- but simply to change the language so that it said exactly the same thing in a slightly more formal tone.

And then there was the punctuation. Nearly every presenter had some kind of designation after their name -- PhD or MD or something like that -- and Eleanor, for every single one, had inserted periods between the letters. PhD had become Ph dot D dot, and MD had become M dot D dot. She hadn’t just written a note at the top of the first page saying that periods should be inserted in all the professional designations. No, evidently not trusting us to catch them all, she had painstakingly drawn little red dots in a thousand places.

I couldn’t believe it. The woman was insane. For a time as I sat flipping through the more than three hundred red-marked pages, so scored with corrections that a blind person could have read them as Braille, I thought maybe someone was playing a trick on me. But then I remembered how gravely serious Eleanor had sounded on the phone, and how persnickety she could be about appearances, and I knew she would never be part of such a prank. She was the planning committee chair for this conference, and its success was ultimately a reflection on her professional standing.

So my first stop was Lily Rasmussen, the twenty-something in Desktop Publishing that Susan had been working with. She was one of those creative types -- hired more for her skill with a Macintosh than her business sense, and everything about Lily was gothic black. The heavy eyeliner, the fingerless gloves, the draping sheer fabric -- everything, of course, except her pasty white skin.

“Alan,” she told me. “This is too much. These edits should have been made at the drafting stage, before the text was given to me. It would take me a week to fix all of this.”

“Can’t you do some kind of search and replace?” I asked, thinking about all the periods in all the PhDs.

Lily shook her head, her Aquanetted shock of black hair not wiggling a bit. “In Word maybe, but the program’s not in Word anymore. Once we import it into our desktop publishing software, all future changes have to be made by hand.”

That didn’t sound right to me, but I knew it would be hopeless to question Lily about it. It was well known that she would sometimes spend half a day chewing on her tongue piercing while looking for the right font to use, and she usually chose the one with the most curly cues on it. Instead, I took my problem to Jurgis and threw myself on his mercy. He was in charge of IT. He could get things done. But I couldn’t just order Jurgis around -- not if I wanted my network passwords to keep working.

“I don’t know what Susan was doing or how there could be so many changes this late in the game, but we simply have to make these edits before the program goes to print.”

Jurgis had the program laid out on his immaculate desk, and was slowly turning the pages over one by one, his rheumy eyes scanning the red marks.

“I talked to Lily, but she said these changes couldn’t be made in Desktop Publishing.”

A bushy black beard covered half of Jurgis’s face, obscuring any clues his expression might have offered as to what he was thinking. Looking into his face was like staring into a bird’s nest that had fallen out of a tree.

“Are you listening to me?” I asked impatiently.

Jurgis placed a finger on one of the pages he was studying. “There,” he said.

“What?” I asked, craning my neck to get a look at what he had found.

“She’s wrong,” he said in his thick accent. “She wants to change ‘comprised’ to ‘composed’, but ‘comprised’ is correct, no?”

I didn’t know and I didn’t care. “Jurgis, look at me.”

He looked up, his eyes like two nuthatch eggs in the nest.

“I need Desktop Publishing to make these changes for me. Lily says it’s not possible, that she can’t even do search and replace on some of the universal edits. Is that true?”

Jurgis shook his head. “No, but DP can not make these changes. The designers are not capable of this kind of keystroke. That’s why policy requires material in final form before submission to DP. One or two changes, okay—but this? No. Lily would spend week on it and only fix half of problems, and make twice as many more.”

“But these changes have to be made,” I said desperately. “If Lily can’t do it, can I get one of the Education staff people to work on it?”

Jurgis looked at me as if I had spat in his vodka. “What you mean?”

“Caroline’s got some free time. How long does it take to learn the publishing software? If we put it on her computer would she be able to make the changes herself?”

“There are no spare licenses. It is illegal to load software on new computer.”

“Then she’ll stay after hours and work on one of the computers in Desktop Publishing.”

“No,” Jurgis said quickly. “I think you should talk to Don.”

I was trying to avoid that step if I could. I knew company policy said DP was to be run as a profit center. But they billed clients by the project instead of by the hour, so the more time a designer spent on a project the less money the company made. If that was what Jurgis was hung up on, I didn’t see how I was going to make any headway with his boss. Don, after all, was the one who wrote the policies.

“I don’t want to talk to Don,” I said pointedly. “I’m talking to you, Jurgis. Can’t you help me out with this thing, just this one time?”

Jurgis folded his arms across his chest and his face went back to its unreadable mask. It was done. Now he would simply sit there and stare at me until I got up and left.

I scooped the pages angrily off Jurgis’s desk and began walking towards Don’s office. I saw him about halfway there, his bloated form barreling down the hallway like a runaway train, and I knew it would be a mistake to talk to him. He had designed the company’s counter-intuitive desktop publishing function. If you wanted it to produce work of good quality, you had to give it all the details up front and not surprise it with any changes. But if you wanted your client to be happy with its output, you had to show them what DP had produced and give them the ability to make changes. The brutal inefficiency and impotence of the exercise was awe-inspiring. If I was Captain Yossarian then Don was Colonel Cathcart and there wasn’t going to be any way past his Catch-22. I needed a new strategy and I thought I knew what it was. Giving Don an acknowledging nod as we passed each other by, I made my way down to Mary’s office.

Ruthie was sitting at her desk just outside Mary’s open door, typing something into her computer at no more than ten words a minute. I tried to catch her attention but she told me to shush as her fingers continued to hunt for the right keys. I stood and waited patiently, the sheaf of misaligned papers tucked under my arm, knowing it wouldn’t serve my purposes to rush her. While I was waiting, Mary poked her head out of her office.

“Ruthie, you’ve got that done, yet?”

“Has it been ten minutes?”

“No.”

“Then it’s not done. Come back after ten minutes.”

Whatever Ruthie was working on, it must have been something Mary had sprung on her at the last minute. Ruthie could occasionally get testy with Mary, her indispensability offering her some immunity in these situations, but she rarely did it in front of other people. When Mary looked self-consciously around and saw me standing there I decided to take my chance.

“Can I get a few of those minutes?”

“Why?” Mary asked. “What is it?”

I held up the dog-eared and post-it note-ridden ream of paper. “It’s Eleanor.”

There was the barest of pauses as I watched Mary’s eyes bounce back and forth between me and Ruthie, as if torn between two equally compelling tasks.

“Take him inside your office,” Ruthie commanded. “This isn’t going to get done any faster with you two chit-chatting out here.”

Inside Mary’s office, sitting at her conference table, I told her the whole story. The phone call from Eleanor, the arrival of the program, Lily and Jurgis’s reactions to it. She listened intently, and then motioned for me to show her Eleanor’s copy of the program. I slid it across the table and watched as she began to flip through it. Her head started shaking almost immediately.

“Why did Susan even send this to Desktop Publishing? Look at all these changes. It clearly wasn’t ready.”

And here was the opening for my new strategy. “I’m not sure all those changes need to be made. Look at this,” I said, pointing to a reworked paragraph. “She’s not correcting anything here. She’s just moving some of the words around. And what about this?” I said, flipping to the section where the presenter names were listed. “What about all these periods in the professional designations? Do we really need to add all of those? We haven’t put periods in our designations for as long as I’ve been working here.”

Mary looked up at me with a puzzled expression, and at the same time Ruthie appeared at the door and moved swiftly into the room. She had a FedEx envelope in one hand and a printed document on company letterhead in the other. Mary quickly moved Eleanor’s program aside and Ruthie slipped the document under Mary’s nose. She began reading it as Ruthie went to retrieve one of Mary’s favorite fountain pens from her desk.

I knew better than to try and read the document Mary was proofing, or even to give that appearance, so I averted my gaze and found myself staring for a few moments at the hideous lapis lazuli globe Don had given Mary as a congratulatory gift upon her ascent to the presidency. It was a monstrosity of executive indulgence, sitting in a place of honor by her windows, a fixture in the track lighting above adjusted to illuminate its reflective surface. The thing sat in its own mahogany frame -- great blue oceans surrounding continents comprising nations carved from thirty-seven different types of precious stones -- and a small, leather-bound log book hanging from a golden chain, in which the proud owner could index the demographic statistics of each country and place a little checkmark next to the ones they had visited. As far as I knew, like every other book in her office, Mary had never even opened hers. 

The scratching sound of Mary’s pen drew my attention away from the globe. Mary was handing the document back to Ruthie, telling her it was good, and reminding her to get it in the drop box in the lobby of the office complex across the street before the four o’clock pick-up. Ruthie nodded in obedience and left us alone in the room.

“Mary,” I said cautiously. “Can’t you call Eleanor and talk to her about some of these changes? Even just the periods? If we could skip those, we might be able to have Desktop Publishing fix all the others.” 

“Desktop Publishing can’t fix any of these errors. You have to do it.”

“What?”

“I’ve already discussed it with Don. It’s against company policy, but it’s what we have to do to keep Eleanor happy. He’s talking to Jurgis now, and Jurgis will set you up on one of the computers in DP. It’s an embarrassment how badly Susan has bungled this, but Eleanor seemed quite relieved to hear that you would be taking responsibility for it.”

“What? Wait a minute. You talked to Eleanor?”

Mary nodded. “About an hour ago. She wanted to keep me in the loop, and commend you for taking this on. She’s got a lot of confidence in you. Good work, Alan.”

I didn’t know what to say. I was so stupefied by what she was telling me I wasn’t sure I was even thinking straight. Here I had been confident that I could somehow convince Mary to negotiate Eleanor down from her ridiculous position -- to get her to agree that what Eleanor was asking us to do was little more than a distraction and not mission-critical -- and instead I discover that Mary had actually been conspiring with Eleanor to make me do all the useless work. I feebly tried to argue that Lily, or maybe even Jurgis, should make the changes, since they already knew the software. But Mary tossed that idea easily aside -- taking me ever so briefly into her hushed confidence to confess that neither Lily nor Jurgis could be relied on to do such detailed work -- and in a few minutes I found myself dismissed from Mary’s presence, my one chance to object wasted on something that hadn’t even made her think twice.

Based on what Don had said at the state of the company meeting, I thought my strategy should have worked. The reality was that fixing things that weren’t broken -- just because your planning committee chair said so -- didn’t serve the social purpose of the organization. It stroked an ego, and it kept people busy, but that wasn’t what we were supposed to be in business for. My mistake was not realizing that Mary didn’t care about that reality. All Mary cared about was keeping Eleanor happy.

4

I stayed late the next three nights working on all of Eleanor’s changes. I still believed they were little more than a waste of effort and that no one except Eleanor would ultimately care. I imagined her at our conference with a copy of the finished and glossy program in her hands, preening myopically over all those little periods with a knowing smile on her face, satisfied in the knowledge that she was still in charge and that she could still speak and compel others to action. I didn’t want to do her bidding, but I knew I didn’t have a choice. With Mary and Eleanor both committed to having the changes made -- and both of them counting on me to do them -- there wasn’t much I could do but comply. 

So I made them. Late each afternoon at quitting time I would go like an inexperienced beggar to Lily’s workstation and she, without making eye contact or speaking to me, would quickly close out of her open work projects, collect her things, and depart. I would try to thank her -- for what I wasn’t entirely sure -- but she would hurry away, as if unwilling to acknowledge my humiliation. And there I would sit -- sometimes for hours -- the line of Lily’s gargoyles looking down on me from atop her monitor with expressions of fear and pity on their distorted faces, methodically going through all of Eleanor’s changes, double and triple checking that I had made each one to her exact specifications.

That first night I got home after nine o’clock and immediately set about to prepare a sandwich without changing out of my work clothes. I knew Jenny had already put Jacob to bed, so appeasing my hunger was my number one priority. While I was standing there in the kitchen eating my turkey and cheese on rye and letting the crumbs fall into the sink, Jenny appeared in the doorway, looking as haggard and as tired as me, and began telling me about the things that had happened during her day.

“The neighbor’s dog got loose again,” she said accusingly, as if I had snuck home at lunch and let the animal off its leash. “It’s going to bite someone in the neighborhood one of these days.”

My mouth full, I only nodded my head. She hadn’t mentioned Jacob by name, of course, but I knew that was her implication, and that this manufactured threat against his safety was evidently my responsibility to address. I remained silent and took another bite of my sandwich.

“Salmon was on sale again at the grocery store today,” she said next. “But I didn’t get any because I knew you’d be working late and it didn’t make sense for me to buy it just for myself.” 

When we were newlyweds I might’ve taken this as a non-sequitur, but now I understood the connection. I smiled as pleasantly as I could while continuing to chew my sandwich, obediently taking a plate out of the cupboard so I could face her and still have something on which to catch the crumbs. Jenny hated it when I worked late, hated it even more when I traveled on business, feeling she had an unfair amount of our child care already on her shoulders. These stealth criticisms were just how she expressed that frustration. It was so much an accepted pattern in our lives that when she started talking next about all the work she had done that day trying to find me a new job, it seemed like a natural transition.

She had dug my latest resume out of a file we kept upstairs and had made some suggested changes to it. She had also circled a couple of ads in the paper she thought I might be interested in. She had done some searching on several online job boards and printed off a few promising leads. She had talked to her network of stay-at-home moms and had sent messages out to her atrophying network of professional ex-colleagues to see if anyone was aware of job openings that might be a good fit. And she had everything organized in a series of file folders, so that when I had finished the sandwich and placed the dish in the sink, she could sit me down at the dining room table and go through them with me one by one.

It was touching, in a way, the care she had taken to keep things organized and to help me get ready for the job search. But at the same time her sweetness carried with it the undertone of hostility she had shown before, and she couldn’t help but express the new frustration she was feeling over the fact that I hadn’t yet done any of this on my own.

“Don’t you want to get out of there?” she asked me as I felt my eyes glazing over with all the details she was throwing my way.

“Sure,” I said. “I guess.”

“You guess?” Jenny said. “They’re taking you for granted. It’s time we started looking out for ourselves.”

I couldn’t disagree with her. But I was tired. More than anything I just wanted to go to sleep.

She drew my attention back to a position announcement she had downloaded from a job board. “Look at this one,” she said, “It’s absolutely perfect for you.”

I took the paper and started reading it, and despite my fatigue, I began to see what Jenny meant. Scanning down the list of required experience and competencies, I found myself mentally checking off each one as something I could already show on my resume. The company name wasn’t familiar to me, but it appeared to be in the same business -- managing nonprofits -- and the position was to serve as the account executive for an organization in a field similar to the one for which I had just donated some unpaid overtime. Salary information wasn’t listed, but from the stats they included it was clearly a larger organization; and it was the top job, not some deputy role where I would be playing second fiddle to an egomaniac. Thinking I wasn’t going to find anything wrong with it, my eye almost skipped past the address of the firm.

“Jenny,” I said. “This job is in Boston.”

She looked at me bashfully. “I know.”

“Do you want to move to Boston?” I asked. I sure as hell didn’t.

She paused, her eyes looking briefly up at the ceiling as if able to see her sleeping son through the floorboards. When she spoke, she spoke quietly, almost in a whisper. “I don’t think we should reject it just because it’s in another city. There are only so many good paying jobs in your field. If we open ourselves up to a national search, we’re more likely to find something that’s a step up for you. And this one looks like a perfect fit.”

My mouth popped open a couple of times while she spoke, but Jenny just kept talking -- slowly, calmly, and rationally -- cutting off each of my objections before they could get started. When she was finished her eyes warned me to keep my response equally even-tempered.

I tried. “But what about Jacob? And you? And the new baby? And your mother?”

She gave me an ornery look as I tacked on that last one. “What about them?”

“Well, it just seems like there’s a lot tying us down at this point in our lives. Is this really the best time to uproot ourselves and move -- potentially across the country?”

“I don’t know,” she admitted. “For the right opportunity, it might be, but we don’t have to make that decision tonight. Send in your application and if you get called for an interview we can start talking about it. If you get called back for a second, we’ll talk about it some more. And if they want you to fly out there and meet the company president, well, then we’ll have to agree it’s something we really want to do before you get on the airplane.”

I looked at her skeptically, her tone reminding me of the conversation we had had a few nights ago, when she had decided that I needed to start looking for a new job.

“Alan,” she said. “You can interview them at the same time they’re interviewing you, you know.”

Sure I could. If the situation was reversed, that’s what Jenny would do. She was always confident and sure, ready to take on the world, and I knew it was easy for her to imagine brokering some sort of sweetheart deal with this unknown Boston company. But I never had her confidence, least of all in myself. My eyes scanned the position requirements again and this time I found my experience lacking in many of the key areas. Reading between the lines, it seemed clear that the company was looking for some kind of turnaround artist -- someone who could come in and chart a new course for a beleaguered nonprofit. Motivate the staff. Develop new leadership. Raise capital. Could I do those things? Thinking about all the parts of the business Mary generally kept hidden from me, I was suddenly a lot less sure.

Jenny clasped my hand. “Can we please just take this one step at a time?”

The second night I didn’t work as late, but only because I had to get home in order to take Jacob to his Sports Class. This was another one of Jenny’s decisions for me -- an opportunity for Jacob and me to spend some time together, doing things she thought all fathers were supposed to do with their sons. The class was part of the local school district’s extra-curricular program, and was designed to help awkward four-year-olds develop some rudimentary physical skills. I still remember the way I felt when Jenny showed me the class description, circled in red in the recreation department catalog exactly the way she would later circle want ads in the newspaper. 

Little Sports Explorer, it was called, and it was billed as a “parent/child” class. Introduce your little aspiring athlete to a new sport or game each week. Kick soccer balls, throw and catch footballs, hit baseballs off a tee -- our focus will be on basic athletic skills, socialization, and fun!! I was usually snarky about these kinds of things, believing that anything that ended in two exclamation points had to be for losers and misfits. But my natural smugness was quickly overmastered by a strange hidden shame that rose in my chest when I realized that Jacob and I had never done any of these things together. Indeed, if we were going to enroll in the class, I wouldn’t have to just buy him a baseball glove, I’d have to get one for myself.

I’d barely seen him the last two days -- leaving in the mornings before he woke and getting home the previous night after he’d gone to bed -- and when I came in the door that night Jenny already had him dressed and ready to go. His shorts were wrinkled, his socks were bunched up around his bony ankles, and the baseball cap he wore -- not from the local team, but from the college Jenny’s father had gone to, a gift the previous year, crisp and never before worn -- was pulled down too far over his eyes. On the drive to the high school where the class was held I looked at him in the rearview mirror.

“Are you excited about Sports Class?” I asked him.

He had to tip his head back so he could see me from under his cap’s visor. “Uh huh,” he said, somewhat hesitantly, and I knew he didn’t have any idea what we were getting him into.

“It’s okay, buddy,” I said as reassuringly as I could. “It’ll be fun.”

The class was taught by a pair of high school students -- girls in their junior year; breastless, athletic girls wearing baggy white t-shirts over their sports bras and shorts too tight for their muscular thighs. One was named Marcie and she had a clipboard, and when she read of the roll of participating children, the six other dads and I one by one raised our hands and said present, each looking around at the other dads after being called out. Some did so self-consciously like me, perhaps embarrassed to have it publicly revealed that they needed teenage girls to teach their sons how to hit a baseball. But others exuded a cocky self-assuredness, and I imagined those dads as ex-high school jocks themselves, now balder and thicker around the middle, but still just as charmed and just as confident in their own infallibility.

One guy, whose son’s name was Tyler, was clearly not there because he thought Tyler needed to learn anything, but so he could see how Tyler’s already developed athleticism measured up against “the competition.” He told me as much while we were standing against the gymnasium wall waiting for our sons to take their turns with a soccer ball.

“You watch the game last night?” he asked me.

“Game?” I said, not having any idea what he was talking about. “What game?”

“What game!” he said incredulously, and then told me the names of two sports teams that must have faced off the previous night while I was busy adding dots between the Phs and the Ds in Lily’s workstation. I didn’t recognize either team -- didn’t even know what sport they were from. I searched my brain for a moment, trying to remember if it was baseball or basketball season. The game. As if there weren’t a hundred games on a hundred different channels every freaking night.

“Oh, that one,” I said simply. “No, I missed it. I had to work late last night.”

“Huh,” he said, the noise sounding like the satisfied grunt of a prize pig. “What do you do?”

I started to explain it to him -- nonprofit organizations, educational conferences, volunteer boards of directors -- but only got halfway through my usual spiel because I could see by the drifting look in his eyes that he had no real interest in what I was saying. Like a lot of grown men who met me for the first time, Tyler’s dad had innocently offered me his heart, accustomed as he was to being surrounded by kindred spirits. The game, my new friend. Didst thou see the game? And when I had failed to embrace it, he had protectively drawn it back and dismissed me as something to fear or shun. I was used to it, and let him off the hook by pretending to get a call on my cell phone.

Despite my troubles relating to the other dads, Jacob seemed to have an impossibly good time. The high school girls had us do all kinds of things in father and son pairs -- kick a soccer ball back and forth, toss a soft fabric baseball to each other, roll a red rubber ball at a set of wooden pins -- and with each new activity, Jacob delighted with the things he could make his body do and the impact he had on the world around him. I could see that he wasn’t as skilled as Tyler and some of the other boys, but Jacob didn’t seem to notice. There was no head-to-head competition -- just each boy learning and practicing the skills with his dad -- and having never done any of these things before, Jacob was simply happy with whatever success he had. At one point while we sat on the bleachers with the rest of the class watching the girls demonstrate our next activity, he actually stood next to me and gave me a hug, kissing me warmly on the cheek as he did so.

“I love you, Daddy,” he said, looking into my ear like a lover and oblivious to both the instruction of the girls and the odd stares of the other dads.

“I love you, too, buddy,” I said, trying to drag him away from my side. His long legs seemed anchored in place, but eventually I got him up over my knees and sat him down in front of me. I pointed to one of our teenage coaches. “Now please pay attention to Marcie.”

The third night I worked until almost eleven o’clock, paying for the hooky I had played with my son the night before. It was my last night to work on Eleanor’s program. It was going to the printer the next day and I had to get all of the changes made so Lily could package it up and transfer the files in the morning.

The office was always a strange place after hours, even more so after the sun went down and the darkness of night filled the space outside the windows. I worked steadily in Lily’s pod until after the last person left for the day -- it was Bethany, I remember that night, swinging by to wish me well with her laptop bag slung over one shoulder and her car keys already in her hand. I worked until after the noises from the cleaning crew’s vacuums and trash carts had faded away with their last trip down the elevators, and until after even the lights of the other office night owls in the building across the street had all gone out. With just a few pages left to go I got up to use the restroom and to get my third soda out of the vending machine, and on my way back I suddenly decided to take the scenic route, making a loop around the office space and peeking in all the darkened rooms.  

The traces of the other human beings I worked with were evident everywhere -- files left open on people’s desks, computers left on in violation of the company’s energy use reduction policy, half drunk cups of coffee being used as paperweights, some with oily lipstick stains glimmering in the dim light. I inevitably found myself in Mary’s office, the door closed but not locked, and I spent several minutes sitting in the chair behind her desk. I didn’t disturb anything -- didn’t really want to -- but hoped to get some kind of sense of what the world must look like from there. In the darkness Mary’s globe was just a round shape and the artwork on the walls mere rectangles. Only the trophies and awards in her display case had any life to them, the little interior accent lights still illuminating their silver and crystal surfaces. At one point I found myself methodically opening her desk drawers one by one. I didn’t touch anything. I simply opened them and peered inside, surprised at how little they contained. 

When I got back to Lily’s workstation the gargoyles were waiting for me, including the big one in the center I had nicknamed Scratch, partly because of the way his claws draped over the top edge of Lily’s monitor, but also because of the devilish grin he wore on his face. Scratch and his crew were definitely in violation of Don’s office décor and accessories policy, but they had kept me company on my lonely vigil and I had decided not to turn them in.

“Well, Scratch,” I said. “What do you think? Should we put this baby to bed?”

Scratch thought that was a good idea, but wondered if there wasn’t something we could do to leave our own little mark on Eleanor’s program. We had, after all, spent a good portion of the time that was supposed to be reserved for our families on it. I made the last few changes called for in Eleanor’s script and saved the file -- and all the while I silently turned Scratch’s devious suggestion over and over in my mind. I should do something, shouldn’t I? Nothing major. Just a little…something -- something to show that asking me to do this was wrong, and that I should’ve said no. That next time I was going to say no. But what? I looked at Scratch to see if he had any ideas, and wouldn’t you know it, that little devil did.

I found it on page 173.

This session is composed of three distinct presentation segments. 

I had already fixed it. On Eleanor’s printed copy, a nearly identical sentence appeared, but in that one she had struck out the word ‘comprised’ with two parallel lines and had written ‘composed’ in her neat red letters in the space above it -- and, like thousands of others, I had dutifully made that change in the electronic file.

It took me only one mouse click and three keystrokes to put things back the way they had been.

5

Even after such a late night, the next day I was back at the office, bright and early. It was the day for our follow-up meeting on the Staff Qualities project, and I had a lot of information to comb through to get prepared. Most of my morning was tied up with meetings, so it wasn’t until after eleven that I was able to sit down at my desk and start working on it. I had asked people to email me their thoughts on the observable behaviors an ideal staff person would display and, somewhat to my surprise, everyone had actually responded. I had seen the emails come in bit by bit throughout the week, but had been so busy with Eleanor’s program and the other final preparations for our educational conference that I hadn’t had any time to open them and see what wisdom they contained. 

Most had sent me a list. Flagging the messages and grouping them together I could see that Peggy, Scott, Jurgis, Angie, and Michael had each sent me a single email with a list of behaviors attached in a Word file. Some lists were longer than others, but they had all done the minimum I had asked for -- probably not giving it another thought after hitting the send button.

Bethany was one of the two outliers in this regard. She had emailed a list like the others -- the morning after her promised free evening of work, according to the date stamp on the email -- but had sent me six subsequent emails since then, each with a slightly revised list attached. I shook my head as I looked through them, eventually putting all seven documents up on my screen at the same time in an attempt to understand her thought process. First she added some new behaviors, then deleted some others, then added more, including some that she had deleted the previous time. I couldn’t make any sense out of her indecision. What was with all the edits? I just wanted a pool of behaviors to start with. It was as if I had assigned her to write a nonsense poem -- ‘twas brillig, and the slithy toves -- and she was struggling to get it just right.

Gerald was the other outlier and he had taken precisely the opposite approach. He hadn’t labored over anything, firing ideas at me as soon as they had occurred to him. He had sent a total of twenty-eight emails, each containing a single behavior in bold capital letters. They had come in throughout the week, some of them outside of office hours, one at 2:36 in the morning. I couldn’t help but wonder if that one had woken him out of a sound sleep. I could almost picture him sitting bolt upright in bed, his designer eyeglasses on the nightstand beside him, and crying out observable behaviors in capital letters.

I took everyone’s suggestions and copied and pasted them into a single document. Bethany’s multiple lists gave me some problems here, but I decided to transfer them all over, knowing I could sort the list and kill off the duplicates more easily than comparing each subsequent version to the last and trying to identify which ones had been added and which ones had been removed. My method would include any that Bethany had thought better of and wanted deleted, but I didn’t care. At this stage of the game I was casting a wide net and was more interested in quantity than quality.

When I was finished I had an alphabetized list of ninety-nine behaviors, and I read them from start to finish, curious to see what impression they would leave on me. My first thought, frankly, was that they covered too much ground. Most were definitely observable behaviors of the type Gerald would approve, but thematically they were all over the map, and it was hard to imagine any one person living up to them.

But I read through the list again, this time looking for holes, for some key area that seemed important but wasn’t already covered. I hadn’t added my own ideas, after all. The past week had been so busy I hadn’t put any thought into this culture-changing effort I was leading. But upon this second review I saw that there wasn’t anything I needed to add. They were a big, nebulous collection of disparate thoughts, jotted down by different people at different times, some poorly worded and others expressing near-identical ideas, but together I could see that they formed a rough picture of what the exercise was aiming at -- the ideal staff person.

Never mind that no human being could actually exhibit all of the necessary behaviors. The list was still the beginnings of a blueprint for total success in our environment. If these traits could be mastered, I thought wildly, if someone could not just show these behaviors but embody the qualities they were meant to demonstrate, there was no telling how far that person could go in the company. A person like that would put amateurs like Mary and Don out of business.

I heard a soft tapping on my office door. I spun around in my chair and saw Bethany standing there.

“You got time for lunch today?” 

“What?” I said, spinning back to look at the clock on my desk and realizing that the lunch hour had already started. 

“Are -- you -- hungry?” Bethany said slowly, the way Jenny sometimes did when I was slow on the uptake. “Do you want to go to the Cellar and get a bite to eat?”

I thought about it for a second. Bethany and I had semi-regularly gone out for lunch before my promotion, when we were both on the same rung of the corporate ladder. It was probably fair to have called us friends of a sort. We spent a lot of time talking about our family lives and I think saw each other as semi-safe confidants of the opposite sex -- someone who could offer candid feedback from the other gender’s perspective when we were having difficulty with our spouses. I knew, for example, that Bethany had been raised in a very strict household -- her father was some kind of Pentecostal minister who forbade even the mildest of curse words to be uttered in his presence -- and that although she had caused something of a scandal by disobeying her father and marrying David, a man she had met in college and an avowed secular humanist -- her upbringing still created conflicts in her marriage. She, in turn, knew that Jenny and I had had our disagreements, and often didn’t see eye to eye, especially where Jacob was concerned.

But we had not gone out to lunch together a single time since I had become her boss. Most days since the promotion I had brown bagged it and ate lunch at my desk, both needing the extra hour to get my work done and not sure if someone of my level was welcome in the company lunch room. Almost no supervisors ate there, and when they did, it was always in groups of fellow supervisors. The rules were unspoken but clearly understood. Supervisors and the people they supervised never mixed in the lunch room, each camp needing to sit at their own tables and have their own conversations. But now that I was the supervisor of supervisors -- the only position like it in the company besides Don’s or Mary’s -- it didn’t seem like I had a group to sit with. Every time I went in there for a cup of coffee or something out of the vending machine, whatever conversation was going on simply stopped, and I could feel the people looking at me out of the corners of their eyes until I left.

But my alienation from the lunch room wasn’t the only reason I was eating at my desk. It felt like the taboo against eating with your direct reports would extend out of the office as well. I might have taken all of my staff out, I suppose. Ryan had done that occasionally -- when a team had something to celebrate, he would take them all out to a restaurant and the company would buy them lunch. But it wasn’t clear I had the authority to spend the company’s money that way, or that my team had anything significant to celebrate. Looking back on it now, I realize I was mostly concerned about what people would think if they saw me out with just one or two members of my staff. Would they think I was playing favorites? And if I was out alone with someone like Bethany, would they think something inappropriate was going on? I knew enough to know that office rumors had gotten started on flimsier evidence.

“Well, do you?” Bethany asked impatiently.

I had thought about it for a second, but probably should have given it more time. “Sure,” I said. “Let’s go.”

The Cellar was a depressing food court in the basement of our office building. It had been decorated in the seventies with giant concrete planters, a smelly water fountain, and no windows. But it was where a lot of people in the company went for lunch because it wasn’t far away, the service was quick, and you could get something different every day. There was a sub place, a Thai place, a Greek place, a soup place, and a pizza by the slice place -- all lined up along one long wall, a stack of cafeteria trays at the start and a pair of cash registers at the end. None of it was name-brand and everything was done on the cheap. Looking behind the counters as you slid your tray down the metal track you’d see things simmering in giant crock pots and whole banks of microwave ovens humming and beeping as their digital numbers wound their way down towards zero. 

Bethany and I both got our food and found an unoccupied table near the fountain. Several other people from the company were already there, eating in groups of three or four, and I nodded hello to each table and we weaved our way through the maze and sat down.

“How late were you at work last night?” Bethany asked as she took a metal spoon out of her purse. Everything in the Cellar was served on paper plates and Styrofoam bowls, and the cutlery was all plastic. Regulars quickly got into the habit of bringing their own silverware. The edges on the plastic spoons they provided were so rough cut by the Korean War-era injection molding machine that must have produced them that you’d finish your soup with dozens of small stinging cuts in the corners of your mouth.

“Oh, I’m not sure,” I lied, affecting a casual attitude, as if I didn’t notice how much time I spent working on mindless projects. “I got home around ten, I think.”

Bethany nodded as she placed a small paper napkin on her thigh. She was wearing a tight business skirt and had to sit sideways in order to cross her legs at the table. “Did you get the program finished?”

“Yes,” I said. “Lily sent it to the printer this morning.” I tried to cut my titanic pizza slice with the edge of my tiny plastic fork, and only succeeded in snapping the flimsy implement in two. The Cellar never had any plastic knives.

Bethany reached into her purse and handed me a metal knife and fork. I accepted them gratefully. “I guess I’ve fallen out of the habit of coming here,” I said.

She hooked her hair behind her ear as she leaned forward to begin spooning up her soup. “We haven’t had lunch together since you got your promotion.”

It was true, but not something I necessarily wanted to discuss. And besides I was distracted by the flatware she had handed me. It was nice -- heavy and solidly constructed, with a frosted finish and little floral designs on the tip of each handle. “Were these a wedding present?” I asked, holding the fork up.

Bethany nodded and swallowed the soup in her mouth. “Yes, but we never use them. Their eleven brothers and sisters sit in a velvet-lined drawer in our china cabinet.”

“They’re the same kind we have.”

“Really?” Bethany said, sitting up a little straighter.

“Yeah,” I said. “We don’t use ours, either.”

We ate in silence for a few minutes, me looking around at the crowd and from time to time catching some of the other employees staring at us. A group of Education staff were at one table, Caroline Abernathy among them.

“Thanks for sending me your list of observable behaviors,” I said, telling myself to ignore them and deciding to find something business-related to talk about.

“You’re welcome,” Bethany said. “Sorry about all the edits I made. I just kept thinking about it all week.”

I shook my head and told her not to worry. “I got a lot of good responses from everyone else, too. You’re not the only one who’s been putting some thought into it.”

Bethany smiled. “That’s great,” she said. “I didn’t mean to sound like such a brown-noser last week. I really am excited about this project. A lot of the other department heads are, too. A couple of us think it could really change things -- for the better.”

“I hope so,” I said. I opened my mouth to say something else, but abruptly cut myself off.

Bethany looked at me quizzically. “What?”

I put my fork down and thought about it. I was about to launch into a description of the things I thought needed changing at the company. I certainly had a list of things I thought needed fixing, and had consciously decided to use the staff qualities exercise as a mechanism for addressing them. But those things had to do with the company’s culture, and its culture was a product of the leadership example set by Mary and Don. Criticizing one meant you were criticizing the other, and criticizing the owners of the company you worked for was never a good idea -- least of all to someone you supervised and for whom you had to demonstrate a leadership example of your own. That kind of shit was only meant to flow uphill. Employees complained to their supervisors, but never the other way around. Had we been inside the company walls, I wouldn’t have even approached the subject with Bethany. But there in the Cellar, Mary and the company seemed a little more distant, and Bethany seemed just a little less like my employee.

“Alan, what is it?”

I decided to test her first. “Do you like working at the company, Bethany?”

“Well, sure I do,” she said.

“But you want to change things.”

She looked at me sternly, as if seeing immediately through my annoying subterfuge. “No more than you do, Alan. Isn’t that what the staff qualities are all about?”

“I’d like to think so.”

“Then what’s this ‘do you like working at the company’ malarkey? Don’t go getting all corporate on me now.”

I laughed.

“What?”

“Nothing,” I said, trying to keep from grinning.

Bethany turned suddenly serious, putting her Mikasa spoon down next to her Styrofoam bowl. “No, I mean it. What are you laughing at?”

“It’s nothing,” I said as gently as I could. “It’s just that you said ‘malarkey.’”

“So I did,” she said, turning in her chair and putting her lipstick-stained paper napkin up on the table as if she meant to storm out of there. “What of it?”

I laughed again, and it was the wrong thing to do. She stood up, and I had to reach quickly across the table and grab her hand to keep her from fleeing the scene. “Bethany, please,” I said, my eyes darting around to see if we were still being observed. “Sit down. I’m sorry. It’s just that when you use those code words instead of swearing you sound like an angry Amish woman.”

Talk like that probably wasn’t going to help, but she did sit back down. “Well, what would you call it?” she asked.

“Bullshit,” I said forcefully, and was delighted to see her flinch the way I knew she would when I said it. “It was bullshit and you saw right through it, good for you. Truth is neither one of us really likes working for the company -- not the way it’s currently run -- and we both think that this staff qualities thing has a decent chance of forcing some kind of change there. Isn’t that right?”

Bethany looked at me with a kind of open-mouthed wonder. I didn’t know exactly what was going through her head, but I knew I was having a hard time wrapping my mind around the kind of risk I had just taken. I had more or less declared myself in open rebellion against Mary, and in doing so, I had handed Bethany all the power over me she could have ever desired. What would she choose to do with that power? Would she join me on my mad quest? Would she realize that only someone as brazen as that had any chance to make a difference in the company and line up behind me like the leader I wanted to be? Or would she use this new leverage against me, betray me to the dragon and watch me get bathed in her withering fire? There really was no telling, and the recklessness of the act was invigorating. Realizing I was still holding her hand, I withdrew and sat back against the hard plastic chair with a confident affectation.

“Isn’t that right?”

“Yes,” she whispered. “It is.”

“Okay,” I said, pushing forward before Bethany could change her mind. “Then let’s talk about what we’re going to do next.”

6

Talking with Bethany helped me decide one very important thing. If this insurrection was going to have any chance of success, I was going to have to be careful not to get too far out in front of it. If I tried to position myself as its leader -- the magnetic messiah here to take everyone to the Promised Land -- it was going to fail. I certainly didn’t have the charisma to pull something like that off, but more importantly, there was too much cynicism about leaders and leadership boiled into the culture of our organization.

Mary Walton and Don Bascom were daily reminders that leaders had agendas which rarely coincided with the interests of the people they led. Don wanted his systems running smoothly and Mary wanted her clients staying happy, and neither seemed to care a morsel for any of the people in their employ. And if Don and Mary’s example wasn’t convincing, then all you had to do was look out into the ranks of the volunteer leadership in our client organizations. There you would see even starker examples -- opportunists like Eleanor Rumford, for whom you were just a tool for advancing her own career -- or worse yet, predators like Wes Howard, who used people to satisfy even baser desires.

Every organization had people like these -- small-minded operators like Mary and Don, and major manipulators like Eleanor and Wes -- and everyone knew why people like that rose to become leaders. No one but them would ever have as much drive or ambition. A deep collective understanding had penetrated the consciousness of all who did not have their corrupting aspiration to lead, who only wanted to do their jobs to the best of their abilities and contribute in their own small way to the overall success of the organization. All leaders, they knew, were tyrants, and they each were only interested in their selfish and self-absorbed objectives.

So I couldn’t lead this revolt. If I tried, no one would trust me, seeing in me the same power-mad behavior that had burned them so many times before. But I could help the revolt happen because I had been given a weapon like no other in the company. My position was unique, remember, residing below Mary and Don, but ambiguously above everyone else, such that no one quite understood the limits of my authority. I knew I could start testing those limits by taking liberties, by consciously erring on the side of action, and seeing bit by bit what Mary would allow. And it was that strategy, coupled with the mandate Mary herself had given me to reinvent the way in which the company reviewed and hired talent, which created this unbelievable opportunity to start pushing against the castle walls and see if any of them could be toppled.

Acting alone, or as the visible leader of a movement, would only isolate me and make me easier to destroy. But by turning my special weapon over to the people and letting them decide how to use it, I thought we just might be able to slay the dragon and move back into the keep she had stolen from us.

And that’s exactly what Bethany and I decided we had to do at that afternoon’s staff meeting. Together we had come up with a way to deal with the ninety-nine behaviors, something that could make them manageable and easy to implement within the company -- and most importantly, something that everyone would have a stake in. At its root the idea was based on a brainstorming technique Bethany had read about in one of the trade magazines that were always piling up in her office. It was something called an “affinity diagram.”

“A what?” Michael said as soon as I mentioned it around our afternoon meeting table. There was a sneer on his face and a dash of disdain in his voice, as if it couldn’t possibly be useful for brainstorming if he hadn’t heard of it before.

“It’s a way of taking a long list of things -- things like these behaviors -- and having a group organize them into similar themes and categories.”

“Well, what good will that do?” Michael snapped.

“Let's just try it and see,” I said, and began passing around packs of fluorescent yellow Post-it Notes and black Sharpie markers. I had already distributed copies of the ninety-nine behaviors, and now I asked everyone to help me transfer them to ninety-nine different Post-It Notes. I got a few skeptical looks but no open rebellion, and in a few minutes the table was covered in yellow flags, each with an observable behavior written on it in black ink.

Next I stood up and began transferring the Notes from the table to a large open section of the conference room wall. To keep them from getting stuck together, I could only do three or four at a time, but Bethany got up to help, and when it became clear what we were doing, several of the others pitched in as well. Scott helped, and I thought that was a good sign. So did Peggy, Angie, and Jurgis. Michael and Gerald were the only two who didn’t budge.

“Okay,” I said, turning to face them all with the Notes scattered on the wall behind me. “Here’s what we’re going to do. We’ve got a lot of ideas here, but there’s too many and they’re too interrelated for them to do what we want -- succinctly describe the qualities of an ideal staff person. So we’re all going to come over to this wall -- Michael and Gerald; you, too -- and together we’re going to move the Post-It Notes around until the behaviors are grouped into the categories that make the most sense.”

“Categories?” Angie said, looking at the wall behind me as if expecting to see more information there. “What categories?”

“I don’t know,” I said calmly. “We’re going to let the group decide that. Oh, and we’re going to do this grouping of behaviors without talking to each other.”

“What!?”

Michael had risen from his seat but had not moved away from the table. 

“You heard me right, Michael. No talking.”

“But how are we going to decide on the categories if we can’t talk about them first?”

I saw the anxiety in his eyes. “I don’t know,” I said, perhaps too smugly, quietly happy to see him squirm. “Why don’t we give it a try and see what happens.”

Michael looked around the room, his eyes searching for an ally. Only he and Gerald remained near the conference table -- Gerald sitting quietly and Michael standing beside him. Everyone else was already gathered with me near the wall of Post-it Notes, staring back at him and waiting to see what he would do.

Suddenly Gerald rose to his feet. Michael looked at him with relief, but then with growing concern as Gerald slowly made his way around the conference table. The cluster of us parted to give him room to leave if that was what he planned to do -- and part of me feared he would. If there was anyone in the room who was going to see through my clumsy attempt at team building, it was Gerald -- because Gerald was not a team player. But to everyone’s surprise, Gerald did not leave the room. Instead, he gave me an odd sort of satisfied look and then began rearranging Post-It Notes on Mary’s white wall. 

All eyes were suddenly on me. Eyes surrounded by happy faces, and no face more happy than Bethany’s. She positively beamed at me.

“Well, go on,” I told them. “Don’t just stand there. Take a look at what Gerald is doing. Do you agree with how he’s grouping them? If not, move them around. That’s another one of the rules. Anybody can move any behavior to another group or to a new group at any time. We’ll keep going until no one wants to make any more moves. And remember -- no talking!”

Then they all fell in, lining up along the wall on either side of Gerald and paying close attention to what he was doing. I waited until several had begun to touch the Post-It Notes, creating their own groupings and even pulling Notes out of the groups Gerald was building, before turning to face Michael.

He still stood on the other side of the table, his lower lip protruding like a kid who hadn’t been picked by either playground team. I didn’t know what his hang-up was, but I told myself to go easy on him as I slowly made my way over to his side of the table.

“Michael, come on, just give it a try,” I said as softly as I could, not realizing how much my voice would carry in the silent room. It was odd to have that much activity and for there to be no sound but the papery shush of sticky Post-It Notes coming off the wall. “We need your input. This isn’t going to work unless everyone participates.”

He gave me an ornery look and seemed ready to say something, but then held it back.

“What?” I asked him, whispering because I could tell by his darting eyes that he was concerned about us being overheard.

“Nothing,” he said softly through clenched teeth. “It’s nothing.”

That was a lie if I ever heard one. Something was boiling away under Michael’s collar, but I wasn’t likely to hear about it now. Later he might come storming into my office to complain, or worse yet he’d bitch to a group of junior staff and it would be morphed into next week’s office gossip, but he wasn’t going to tell me now -- not now, when I could actually do something about it. And suddenly I thought, you know what? Screw it. I’m doing the best I can with this, and if Michael wants to get his undies all twisted up, then he’ll just have to straighten them out by himself. I’d lost my patience for his melodrama.

“Fine,” I said directly. “Then how about acting like a grown up and joining the others in this little exercise?”

Michael gave me a searing look, and I knew I was going to pay for that remark later, but I held firm and eventually he went over and joined the group. I watched him as he stood there unmoving for a while, a dead insect lost and forgotten on the outskirts of the colony, but I could tell by his posture that he was paying close attention to what everyone else was doing.

“No, not there!” he said suddenly, his deep voice echoing off the vast white wall with all its fluttering yellow flags. He rushed forward, ripping a Note off the wall, one that Angie had just moved from one group to another. “These are all about problem solving,” he said angrily, making a big circular motion with his hand. “This,” he said, holding the single Note up in front of Angie’s nose, “is about showing initiative. It belongs over here.” He slapped the Note on the wall where he thought it belonged, and then turned back to the group, a smug and confident smile on his face.

I felt like running over there and smacking the arrogant prick on the head, but I held myself back, waiting to see how the others would handle it. It pleased me to see the confidence drain out of Michael’s face as he was met by the scowls and frowns of the other department heads.

“Michael,” Bethany said gently. “It’s okay if you want to move that behavior to a new group, but you’re not supposed to talk about it.”

“Well, why not?” Michael complained. “How are we supposed to get the groups right if we don’t talk about them and decide what they should be?”

“We were doing just fine before you opened your mouth,” Scott said peevishly. It was the first thing he had said in the whole meeting. “Did you not know that group was for problem solving and this one was for showing initiative?”

“Well, yeah,” Michael said reluctantly. “But if that was so clear to everyone, why did Angie put that behavior in the wrong group?”

“Maybe I did put it in the wrong group,” Angie allowed. “But maybe I didn’t. Maybe I see a different pattern and that behavior belongs in that group.”

“Maybe,” Michael said skeptically, looking back at the wall. “But how are we supposed to know that unless you tell us about it?”

“Michael,” Gerald said with great diplomacy. “We don’t want to talk about it. If we talk about it, it’ll turn into an argument, and if it’s an argument then someone will want to win it, and that’ll likely be the person who complains the most. We’re not trying to win an argument here. We’re looking for a consensus, and the best way to find one is to give everyone equal authority in the process. That means no squeaky wheels. Just actions the group is free to accept or reject.”

Michael shook his head. “This is fucking crazy.”

“Just try it, okay?” Peggy said, clasping Michael’s arm. “If you just be patient and watch, I think you’ll find that this process is working.”

It was good to see the group policing itself like this, and especially satisfying to see Gerald expressing such support, but a little alarm bell went off in my head when Michael yanked his arm out of Peggy’s gentle grasp. He looked ready to bite her, but he partially composed himself when he saw her shocked look. 

“I’ll watch,” Michael said tersely. “But I’m not going to be quiet if I see you guys doing something wrong.”

“Then get out of their way, Michael,” I said irritably. “You can play by the rules or you can sit on the sidelines. You decide.”

Michael gave me another venomous look, and I thought he might go storming out of there, like he had the week before when I hadn’t taken his complaints about Gerald seriously. I really didn’t want him to leave. Everyone needed to be a part of this if it was going to work, but I also couldn’t have him disrupting the process. Supportive looks from the rest of the team gave me the sense I was handling him right, and I returned his stare with equal vehemence.

“Okay,” Michael said, plopping himself like a pouting child into one of the conference room chairs and crossing his powerful arms across his chest. “I’ll watch and be quiet. But I don’t think this is getting us anywhere.”

It was the best I was going to get. The others turned back to the wall of Post-It Notes. I kept my attention on the back of Michael’s thick head for a while, but as he maintained his promised silence my eyes were drawn towards the work of the others.

It was fascinating to watch. For twenty minutes they worked in silence, moving yellow behaviors around on a great white canvas, creating something none of them could individually articulate. There was a lot of back and forth -- the same two people often moving the same behavior between the same two groups, but without the ability to argue, one of them would eventually take a step back and look at the larger pattern that was being created. Sometimes they would acquiesce and allow the contested behavior to stay in the other person’s group, and sometimes they would dive in with fresh inspiration and rearrange several other behaviors into new groupings altogether. Once, when Jurgis did this, the others stood back and examined the new arrangement, and then burst into spontaneous laughter, Gerald even going so far as to give Jurgis a congratulatory slap on the back. They couldn’t say anything, but they needed to express their satisfaction, nodding positively to each other and smiling with their mouths open.

I found it inspiring. The only shadow on the production was Michael, who sat unmoving in his chair the entire time. As the group came to their final consensus, the whisper of moving Post-It Notes slowing and eventually stopping like the sound of microwave popcorn, I was determined to find some way to get him engaged.

“Alan.”

I looked up. It was Bethany, standing amidst the others, smiling broadly.

“What?”

“We’re done.”

“You are?” I said, stepping quickly around the conference table to join them beside the wall. It was still covered with yellow Post-It Notes, but now they were all neatly arranged into eleven distinct groups. “Are you sure?” I asked, running my eyes over the black writing on each one. “No one wants to make any more changes?”

“No,” Gerald said. “We’re done.”

I’m not sure I ever saw Gerald smile before, but he was smiling now. They all were. Gerald and Bethany and Jurgis and Angie and Scott and Peggy -- all smiling at me like I had given them some precious gift, some magical talisman that they had used to create something both beautiful and sublime.

And now, in this triumphant moment, I took a pack of blue Post-It Notes out of my pocket and tossed them to Michael. He flinched awkwardly as they landed in his lap, and then clutched at them to keep them from sliding off his thigh.

“Michael,” I said gently. “Why don’t you put a title on each of these groups.”

He looked at me like I was speaking a foreign language. “What?”

“With those,” I said, indicating the blue Post-Its Notes. “Grab a Sharpie and put a title over each group the rest of the team has assembled. I don’t think anyone will mind.”

Then I saw the understanding come like a blush over his face, followed quickly by a scowl, and for a moment I thought he was going to rebuff me -- thought he was going to throw the Post-It Notes back at me and tell me where to stick them. But then the others started to encourage him. Bethany first, then Peggy in her wholesome way, and then everyone, even Gerald, beckoning Michael forward and asking him to join their team. And where he might have rejected me, I saw, there was no way he could reject them all. 

So like a star pupil called on to solve a difficult problem, Michael rose out of his chair and silently approached the wall. With the blue Post-Its I had given him and the black Sharpie he had taken from the table, he gave each grouping a title, writing each in his strong hand while the rest of the team looked on approvingly. 

Thrives in a team environment, was the first one Michael wrote and stuck on the wall, followed by Shows initiative and Anticipates challenges. He stood and thought for a while with the next grouping, eventually settling on Creatively applies resources to solve problems, and then fired off Maintains positive relationships and Shows respect for others in quick succession. Supports the mission of the organization was an easy one, as was Practices a healthy work/life balance and Mentors others. An actual buzz of excitement began to rise in the room as Michael wrote and affixed Values professional development, culminating in an actual round of applause when Is visionary rounded out the group of eleven. 

There were no surprises -- not for me nor for anyone else in the room. Bethany’s affinity diagramming had worked so well that any one of us could have done what Michael did and we would have wound up using the same or very similar words. In one hour we had done what had seemed impossible the week before -- we had described the characteristics of the ideal staff person and, for each trait, we had a list of observable behaviors. The mechanism to generate the interview questions that would help hire new staff, and to reframe our performance evaluations to better determine rewards and incentives, was there on the wall before us. We had succeeded far beyond anyone’s expectations and we had done it by working together as a team. As Michael turned away from the wall, a transformed look of satisfaction and pride on his face, I felt like there wasn’t anything that team couldn’t do.

+ + +

“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/