When Ryan ran the company, he used this information to negotiate service fees with our clients. He didn’t care how many hours you worked. He wanted to know how many hours you were working so he could make sure the company was billing its clients appropriately, but he didn’t make any value judgments about your performance based on the number of hours you were reporting. He had other benchmarks for that, things connected to your project and development objectives.
But Mary was not Ryan. The things Ryan judged you on were just too fuzzy for a dedicated number-cruncher like Mary. When it came to evaluating people’s performance, Mary wanted something that could be counted, something that could fit precisely on one of her spreadsheets and be analyzed. Something like how many hours you were reporting on your timesheets.
It was amazing how quickly it happened. I remember sitting in the lunch room one day, just a handful of months after the change in leadership. I was with a group of my fellow department heads—people like me who directed staff and programs in a particular functional area and who, like me, had previously reported to Ryan and were now reporting to Mary. These were all people I would later come to supervise when I got my much-publicized promotion to deputy account executive, but that day they were just peers, on the same level of the corporate ladder as me. People like Gerald Krieger and Bethany Bishop.
Those are just a couple of names to you, I know, a couple of names no different than any others you might pull randomly out of the phone book. I’ll tell you more about them later—they both actually have a pivotal role to play in the drama that’s about to unfold—but forgive me if I can’t help but stop here for a moment to reflect on how funny life can be.
You know how sometimes people pass in and out of your life, affecting you profoundly one day and then it seems you hardly think of them the next. Mary, and Gerald, and Bethany—it’s almost like they’re characters in a book I read a long time ago and usually have trouble remembering. But sitting here talking with you, it’s like I’ve taken that book down off the shelf and I’m starting to page through it again, and I’m remembering not just these characters and their names, but the parts each of them played in the story, and I realize that the story wouldn’t be the story without each of the characters making it so. If I leave any of them out, the story won’t be complete, and I’d have to make up a different ending.
Okay. I suppose that might be a little too heavy on the psychoanalytical bullshit, so let’s just put that aside for now. We’ll have plenty of time for the deep end of the pool later, whether I swim out there myself or you push me in.
The point is we were a bunch of middle managers having lunch together, too high up the ladder to have lunch with anyone else, but not high enough to get away with not eating in the lunchroom. It was a day like any of a hundred others, the table cluttered with our soft-sided thermos lunch bags and microwaveable meal trays, until Bethany Bishop asked me how many hours I reported on my timesheet last month.
I looked at her blankly. Even though I had just turned in my time report that morning, I wasn’t sure what she was asking me. The procedure had become so routine, adding up the numbers from my calendar and writing them down in the correct boxes on the paper form, I had come to retain little memory of the exercise itself, much less each set of calculated results. She might as well have asked me how many teeth I had brushed that morning.
“I don’t remember,” I said, distracted, as I often was, not just by her question, but by the odd shape of her nose. Bethany is an attractive woman, don’t get me wrong, at least five years younger than me, but her nose is too wide for her face, with a tip that turns up and twists to one side. I always thought it gave her a sort of backwater beauty queen look, like the prettiest girl at the county pageant who doesn’t stand a chance at the state fair. Eventually, I told her I thought I had reported a hundred and eighty hours.
“Is that it?” I remember Gerald scoffing. He was older than everyone, just a few years away from retirement with an ego larger than his bloated 401(k) account. He’d recently joined the company, recruited specifically for his business world experience to help turn around an ailing department. He always wore this pair of ridiculous designer eyeglasses—you know, the kind with a row of sparkly white gem stones embedded in each golden ear strut. In meetings he would often lean way back in his chair, his steepled fingers poised in the air before him, and look at the rest of us through those glasses like we were members of an alien species. I remember him saying, “You’re not going to get anywhere in this company reporting numbers like that.”
“How many hours did you work last month?” Bethany asked him.
“Well,” Gerald said evasively, like he always did when he was working one of his angles. “I reported two hundred and forty.”
“No way,” Bethany said. “That’s sixty hours a week. I’ve been putting in extra time and you’re never at the office later than me. You’re not working that much.”
“Hey,” Gerald replied. “It’s not about how many hours you work. It’s about how many hours you write down on your timesheets.”
And, of course, Gerald was right. Long before any of the rest of us realized the game had changed, Gerald had already figured out the new rules and was playing to win. Mary Walton wanted allegiance to the company above all else, and she measured that allegiance simply by the number of hours of your life you were willing to sacrifice to it. Gerald understood that first, but eventually we would all come to understand it—and we would all react to it in our own ways.
If you ask me, the wiser ones would be like Gerald, adroitly skipping across the surface of Mary’s quagmire, keeping their shoes as dry as possible and looking for the firm ground that lay beyond. The less experienced would be like Bethany, believing the lie that hard work would be rewarded, and diving deep in hopes of finding treasure in the murky depths.
And then there would be the handful like me, who would eventually decide to trek across the swamp and fight the dragon in her own lair.
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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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