She guaranteed that her financial statements, tabulated every month for every client organization, were totally error-free. It was a matter of extreme pride with her. She’d pass them out at client board meetings and she’d have this look on her face, a smug and self-satisfied look, like she just ate your dessert while you weren’t looking. It was a look that seemed to say to anyone who would challenge her, “Go ahead. Take out your pathetic little solar-powered calculator and add up every column. Go ahead, you hapless cluck. Add it up. You won’t find even as much as a penny out of place on my spreadsheets.”
And she knew you wouldn’t, because Mary had already checked and double-checked every calculation by hand, not trusting something as notoriously unreliable as Microsoft Excel to do all that heavy lifting for her. Mary was like that. She didn’t trust anyone. If she was going to report financial numbers to a client board of directors, she was going to make damn sure they were right and that she knew them frontwards and backwards, even if that meant coming in early and working late every day for a week.
Now, I know what you’re thinking. “Bully for her,” right? Like, “Gee whiz, Alan, that Mary sure sounds like a go-getter.” Okay, yeah, I can see why you might think that. But you need to understand, Mary didn’t just come in early and work late for a week before big client meetings. Mary came in early and stayed late every day, whether we were pressed up against a deadline or not. She had this habit of always finding more things to do, some of which needed doing, but most of which just distracted her from the real job. I’m not even sure she realized she was sabotaging her own efforts to keep the clients happy by piling all this meaningless busy work on her plate. She had the most oppressive workload of anyone, no doubt, but it was largely an oppression of her own doing, and she seemed to revel in this manufactured spirit of indispensability, wearing it for everyone to see like sunscreen not rubbed in all the way.
A big part of what drove Mary to these extremes stemmed from her travel schedule, one of the most brutal in the company. When I joined the organization, we had fifteen or so clients, and Mary did the books for them all. Sure, she had people in the financial department to help her with the paperwork, but when it came to keeping track of the money and reporting the results to the client boards—that was all Mary. Each client had two or three board meetings a year, and Mary went to them all—no matter where they were located or when they were scheduled. Weekends, holidays, weddings, funerals, total eclipses of the sun—it didn’t matter. Mary would miss them all if there was a client board meeting scheduled in conflict with it. The woman actually scheduled c-sections for the births of her two kids. Not because they were breach or because her doctor advised it, but because she didn’t want something as unpredictable as going into labor to interfere with her commitments to the client organizations she served.
And that’s the point I’m trying to get to. It’s not that she didn’t love her family. She had a husband from the same little town she grew up in—her high school sweetheart for all I know, he certainly was built like the captain of the football team—and two shy little kids who came to every company picnic with white shorts, fresh haircuts and sallow faces. It’s just that when it came time to make a choice, the company and the clients it served came first every time. This is who Mary Walton is. It’s how she’s wired. And when she moved into that client management position and took over as de facto president of the company, she naturally brought this wiring with her. Suddenly there was an expectation that everyone in the company should be as dedicated to the mission as she was.
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“Dragons” is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. For more information, go here.
This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.
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http://lres.com/heres-why-amcs-need-to-pay-close-attention-to-looming-regulatory-changes/businessman-in-the-middle-of-a-labyrinth/
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