I felt a little like the subject of some kind of psychological experiment—you know, like the kind you hear about, where the researchers trick a bunch of self-absorbed college kids into thinking they’re helping with some vital research project, but in fact it’s the students and their reactions that are the focus of the study.
I read about one once where the college kids were instructed to administer electrical shocks to a supposed test taker hooked up to electrodes in another room—one shock of increasing intensity for every question they got wrong. It was all fake. No one was really getting shocked in the other room, but they wanted to see how far tomorrow’s leaders would go before speaking up and bucking the authority embodied in the researchers that had recruited them. You might’ve heard about this one, too. As long as there was some asshole with a lab coat and a clipboard standing over them, the cream of the next intellectual generation just kept doing what they were told and shocking the idiot test taker in the other room, even after the co-conspirator pretending to be shocked started crying and begging them to stop.
There were times when working at that company felt like you were participating in one of those dishonest research studies, and this was clearly one of those times. It bothered me, and I needed some time to think about it. So I decided to stay in my office as much as I could for the rest of the day, even eating my lunch at my desk. But people kept finding me—supervisors and junior staffers, some of whom were my direct reports but many of whom weren’t. They all came slinking in quietly, as if not wanting to disturb me, but wanting to know what had happened, and more insistently, what was going to happen next.
I didn’t have any concrete answers for them, and since then I’ve learned that when people are let go, that’s what everyone who stays behind needs. They need to be reassured that the bleeding has stopped and that no more cuts are going to be made. Those staffers came to me because I had been in the meetings, and because I was far more approachable than either Mary or Don would have been, and they all had the same look on their faces and the same tone in their voices.
Ha, ha, they would seem to giggle nervously, tough luck for poor Amy Crawford getting tossed out on her ass, eh, but—but I’m okay, right?
I didn’t know what to tell them. I didn’t think there was going to be any more fallout from the situation with Wes, but I felt turned around and wasn’t completely sure, and worse yet, I was uncertain how much of what had happened I should share with them. There are always legal implications in these situations—things you’re allowed to say and things you’d better keep to yourself. And neither Mary nor Don had given me any indication of where those lines were to be drawn. So I shrugged my shoulders a lot, and responded with a bunch of empty platitudes, and at the end of a frustrating and wholly unproductive day, I decided to go and see Mary.
I remember approaching Ruthie cautiously, not sure how she was going to react to my request.
“Hey, Alan,” she said with what seemed like genuine concern in her voice. “How are you holding up?”
“Okay,” I said stupidly. “Is Mary around?”
“She’s in a meeting with Don, but should be back soon. Do you need to talk with her?”
“Yeah,” I said, looking around as if expecting to see a waiting room chair to sit in.
“Why don’t you go on in?” Ruthie offered. “I’ll walk down and let her know you’re here.”
“What? Really?”
Ruthie stood up. “Sure,” she said. “You could probably use a few minutes of reflection time. Nobody’s going to bother you in there.”
Ruthie was right, as Ruthie usually was. I was surprised that there was no bluster in her voice, no calculation or intrigue, but I took her at her word. Whatever she thought about how Susan and I had approached her that morning, she wasn’t holding any grudge, and she was offering me a small measure of comfort after a dark and trying day.
Upon walking into Mary’s office I was again struck by how large it was, but also by how neat and immaculate she kept it. Right inside her door was a kind of exhibit case—a glass-enclosed bookshelf on which dozens of plaques and awards were displayed. Mary was especially proud of these honors, but only a handful were ones she had earned herself. Most were accolades given to the non-profit organizations we managed, and which Mary had simply accepted on their behalf. That always felt a bit like cheating to me—displaying awards recognizing the work of others—but Mary seemed to revel in their acquisition. I saw the one the Communications Department had won for the redesign of one of our newsletters, and it reminded me how Mary, in congratulating the team on a job well done, had commented that she already had a space picked out for it in her display case, and about how much she was looking forward to showing to Eleanor the next time she visited our offices.
I knew the after-hours cleaning people had explicit instructions to keep Mary’s trinkets dust-free and sparkling, and as I stood there looking at them in all their dazzling brilliance, I suddenly realized what Mary’s office was for, and why it was so different from the rest of our space.
I turned around and let my eyes sweep over the whole of the room. The window walls and the city beyond provided an upscale architectural backdrop for the scattered groupings of modern furniture. I looked at the original artwork hanging on the walls, knowing they weren’t anything Mary had had a hand in. Trust me. I’ve been to Mary’s house, where Thomas Kinkade is clearly revered as the pinnacle of artistic achievement. The artwork in her office was daring, as far as corporate art went, but it wasn’t Mary’s style at all. Nothing in the office really was. She looked out of place in her office, just like she looked out of place in her rented her business suits, because nothing in the office was for her. It wasn’t a place where she was expected to get any work done and it wasn’t a place where she could feel at home.
Funny thing about Mary’s office. When Mary was around people tended to avoid it as much as they could, but when Mary was on the road you’d find them inventing excuses to walk by and try to get a peek inside. At these times Ruthie usually kept jealous guard over the space, keeping its lights dimmed and preventing anyone from intruding, treating it like that room in your grandparents’ house that was used only rarely for entertaining guests from outside the family. And that’s what Mary’s office was. The out-of-town guests were the VIPs from the client organizations, who would come by several times a year for closed door meetings with Mary to talk strategy and plot intrigue. The apartment in the sky with its original artwork and its shining treasures was meant to impress them—not us, and not even her. By comparison, Mary and all of us who worked for her were just the unruly children who could not be trusted to keep our feet off the furniture.
With these thoughts in my head I walked over and stood in the very corner of Mary’s two window walls, planting my fists on my hips and reveling in the fantasy that I was king of all I surveyed. Although I had never really been afforded such an opportunity before, I found the sights of the city from Mary’s office achingly familiar. The park across the way where street musicians performed and business people sat at picnic tables to eat their lunches and play hooky. The ancient cathedral with its imposing clock tower and patina-ridden cross, dozens of pigeons nesting in its crevices and nodding their heads like penitent sinners as they walked the length of the roofline. The cluster of blocky bank buildings that seemed to creep closer each year, offering an increasingly voyeuristic view of the small and silent figures that moved about within. And the shimmering water on the lake and the slowly moving sailboats that went in and out of the harbor as if time itself had ceased. I had seen all of these things before, but from Mary’s office they seemed to take on a different meaning. Gazing out on all that activity I saw for just a moment or two that there actually was more to life than what was waiting for me in my windowless cell.
“Hello, Alan.”
It was Mary. She had entered the office and by the time I turned around she was already halfway to her desk and moving quickly.
“Ruthie said you wanted to see me. You’ll have to make it quick. I don’t have much time.”
I pulled myself away from the window and came over to stand behind one of her visitor chairs. Without looking at me, Mary dropped her leather-bound organizer on her desk and sat down in her chair. She pulled open one of the desk drawers and took out a small stack of business cards. Combining them with a few stray ones tucked into the front pocket of her planner, she began counting them out onto the desk, dealing them down one by one like she meant to play a game of Solitaire. I kept silent, letting her finish, knowing that she would not want to be interrupted while counting. When she was done, she looked up at me impatiently.
I thought I was ready. “I’ve been thinking a lot about what happened today.”
“Lots of things happened today,” Mary said quickly. “Which ones are you referring to?”
“Amy getting fired,” I said bluntly. “And Susan resigning.”
“Uh huh,” Mary said, her eyes falling back down to her planner, while her hands stuffed the little pile of counted cards into the front pocket and placed the remainder back into the drawer. “What about them?”
“Well,” I said evasively, realizing that I wasn’t ready for this at all. “How do you feel about them no longer being here.”
It was a dumb question, and Mary didn’t need more than a second to compose her response. “I feel fine,” she said, swinging around in her chair to face the monitor on her desk’s side return and reaching for her mouse. “Amy’s days have been numbered for a while and, all things considered, it’s probably better for everyone that Susan decided to leave.”
I watched her as she starting clicking away with her mouse, her eyes quickly passing over a day’s worth of collected email, deleting roughly every third one with a practiced eye.
“Why?” she said somewhat absently. “How do you feel about it?”
I held my breath. “I feel bad. Especially about Susan. I think she could have made some significant contributions around here.”
Mary deliberately set her mouse aside and turned to face me. “Alan, sit down.”
I did as instructed, sinking into the uncomfortable chair Mary had provided for all visitors.
“What’s this all about?” she asked.
I decided to go for broke. “I don’t know, Mary. It just feels wrong. I thought Susan was the kind of person we wanted to have in this organization. And it feels like she was pushed out.”
Mary shook her head. “I wouldn’t say that we pushed Susan out, but she clearly didn’t mesh with our culture.”
“Then how’d she get hired in the first place?”
“What?”
The question just sort of popped out of my mouth, but Mary’s reaction told me I was on to something, that I might have just stumbled onto the thing that could make some headway. “Then how’d she get hired?” I rambled on. “I mean, don’t take it the wrong way, but don’t we screen candidates for cultural fit before bringing them into the organization?”
It was too much. I could tell by the fire in Mary’s eyes. The only thing that saved me was that I had used we instead of you. If I’d had the audacity to say Don’t you screen candidates? Mary would have almost certainly seen it as a criticism, as an attack, as a threat to her authority.
“I mean,” I said, desperately trying to keep myself in the frying pan, “if we don’t have something like it already, maybe we need some kind of process to help identify individuals with the traits that will best translate into success in our environment. Something that could identify people with the wrong traits and ferret them out of our hiring process.”
It was glib. Almost too glib. I was just thinking on my feet, really just stringing together a bunch of buzzwords into something that sounded halfway rational, but Mary seemed to consider it for a moment.
“Good idea,” she said finally. “You’re in charge. Pull the department heads together and come up with a draft for my review.”
Mary turned back to her computer and resumed the destruction of her email. I didn’t get up to leave right away, at once relieved that I had lived to fight another day, but apprehensive of this new and unknown challenge that had just been put in my path. My eyes wandered to the credenza behind Mary’s desk, and to the framed photo of her and her family that sat there for all us visitors to see. One would think that of all the prizes to be found in her office, this simple portrait would be the one item that was uniquely Mary, that was closest to her true but unfathomable heart. It was a tight shot of four blonde-haired people, all of them with the same pained smiles on their pinched faces, looking for all the world like a group of magnets held artificially together and ready to fly apart as soon as the camera flashed and their natural law of repulsion could again take hold. Even it looked staged to me, almost like one of those paper photos that come with the tasteful frames you buy in the executive section of the office supply store.
“Was there something else?” Mary asked, her finger still clicking away on her mouse.
“No,” I said, rising to my feet and almost rushing from the room.
+ + +
“Dragons” is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. For more information, go here.
This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.
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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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