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 a whole bank 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 a 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 I 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.”
+ + +
“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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