As we made our way out of Mary’s office, I split off from her to get my presentation materials, and by the time I got back to the conference room, Mary and all the department heads were already gathered around the table.
I noticed an odd silence when I entered the room—the dozen or so copies of the staff qualities and their associated behaviors sticking haphazardly out of the file folder I had grabbed from the stack still hiding my interview notes on my desk. It wasn’t one of those silences where everyone in a room stops talking when you enter it. That happened all the time in the company; so often it was almost the norm. No, this silence was different. It had a much greater permanence to it, as if it had been brewing for a long time. Stepping into that conference room was like opening the door to a forgotten tomb and discovering huddled about in the fetid air the undisturbed remains of an ancient queen and her royal attendants. It was obvious that this group of mummies—Gerald, Bethany, Jurgis, Peggy, Scott, Angie, and their leader, Mary, sitting as if bejeweled and enshrined at the head of the conference table—had been passing the time prior to my arrival in uncomfortable silence. As I entered the room, the only human movement to dispel the crypt-like impression came from Mary herself, her head turning and looking up at me in cold anticipation. All the others sat unmoving, their gazes askance in different directions, all looking safely at nothing in particular.
“Alan,” Mary said, the warmness in her voice opposing the chilliness of her stare. “Please. Come in. Sit down.”
I did as requested, taking the only available seat, the one at the bottom of the table, directly opposite Mary. Bethany sat on my immediate right, and as I settled in I saw her eyes flip up fearfully, catching mine for an instant before dropping back down to the tabletop.
“We were just talking about Michael,” Mary said amiably, as if he was just down the hall, a few minutes late to the meeting, same as me. “I was telling the group about the news he shared with me this morning and some of the unfortunate steps we had to take as a result.”
I looked at Mary suspiciously. News he shared? What did she mean by that? She didn’t tell them about what Michael had said about me, did she? I wanted to ask these questions, but couldn’t bring myself to do so in front of the audience. “Oh, yes?” was all I was able to say.
“Indeed,” Mary said. “The news came as quite a shock—to me, as well as to everybody in this room. Michael was well-liked in the company. The group here has a lot of questions about what’s going to happen next.”
I looked around the table at the department heads, Mary’s description of their concern grossly out of sync, at least with their posture. Most were still looking away, their body language indicating they would crawl under the conference table if they could, but a few turned towards me, and they had anything but questioning looks on their faces. Peggy was one, I remember. Her sad eyes looked at me with droopy compassion, as if she yearned to spare me from some terrible ordeal. Gerald was another, his eyes behind his glasses more a warning, a caution to watch my step, and a promise, I thought, to guard my back if I decided to move forward.
“Such as?” I asked.
“Well,” Mary said coolly, “their biggest question seems to be ‘Why?’ Why did Michael resign? Given the legal realities of the situation, there’s of course only so much we can publicly tell them. But, I wonder, in confidence, what would you say, Alan? What would you say was Michael’s reason for resigning?”
I looked at her incredulously. What was she trying to pull? Did she expect me to tell them it was my fault Michael left the company? I didn't even think that was true. “I don’t know, Mary,” I snapped. “You’re the one he talked to. All I know is what you told me.”
Mary’s eyes narrowed, looking at me like an insect she had found crawling across the Persian rug in her office. “Well, let’s just say that he never felt comfortable here. That there are…people, here, who never made him feel welcome.”
She looked at me the whole time she said this. Anyone who had their eyes up—and most still didn’t—certainly saw what she was doing and couldn’t fail to make the connection. I had no idea why she was trying to tar me in front of all the remaining department heads, and although her clumsy attempt made me angry, I kept my mouth shut. Perhaps because of my recent experience with Pamela Thornsby, I knew it wouldn’t do any good to lose my cool, and besides, I wasn’t sure Mary’s attempt at character assassination was having the effect she was looking for. There was more than one person around the table, I knew, who couldn’t possibly be upset about Michael’s decision to leave.
“Were there any other questions?” I asked, turning my gaze away from Mary and addressing the group as a whole, trying to draw others into the conversation.
“Only one,” Mary said. “Who’s going to pick up all of Michael’s work until his replacement is hired?”
That one was at least easier for me to answer. “I will,” I said with as much enthusiasm as I could muster, knowing that the existing company culture demanded no less, and that nothing was at that time more important than setting a leadership example for the others. “I’ll meet with his staff later today and get the run down on all the projects already in motion.”
“I’ll help.”
It was a mousy squeak of a voice, and it took me a moment to realize it was Bethany who had said it. I looked at her, surprised she had even looked up, much less spoken aloud.
“It’s only a few days before the big national conference,” she said a little more confidently, as if needing to justify herself to the table. “And Alan’s already doing Susan’s job. No one should be asked to pick up that much extra work.”
She started strong, but her voice tapered off near the end, as it became clear that everyone around the table was looking at her—some of them blankly, others with a twinge of sorrowful pity, still others with a horror that could not be concealed. But worst of all was Mary, who seemed to zoom in on Bethany, now finding a second insect and magnifying it in her powerful stare, the calculating wheels behind her eyes already turning with the inexorable determination of how best to exterminate it.
“I’ll take care of it,” I said forcefully, touching Bethany’s hand under the table to caution her, and hoping to bring this topic to a close and move on to the original purpose of the meeting. “After all, it shouldn’t be long before we identify qualified candidates for both Michael’s and Susan’s positions. With this new system of staff qualities and behaviors, we think we can dramatically reduce the time it takes to hire, and increase the quality of those hiring decisions.” It was very corporate-speak, I know, but that’s what the situation called for. Delivered appropriately, I knew that corporate-speak had a certain soothing effect on its listeners. It was designed to be inoffensive and value-adding in all of its many dialects, and that’s exactly what I needed at that point.
Without waiting for Mary to respond, I opened the folder in front of me and began passing around copies of the document I had prepared for the meeting. It was a transcription of all eleven staff qualities and their associated behaviors, taken directly from the affinity diagram the department heads had created on that very conference room wall six days ago. I hadn’t changed a word of it, and at that moment I was glad I hadn’t. I had expected that Mary would want to put her own stamp of approval on our work—that was fine, she was the president of the company. But now I saw that she may try to sabotage the entire effort, much like she seemed to sabotaging our team morale by her pessimistic fixation on Michael’s departure and my supposed role in it. If that was the game she was playing, I was going to need every arm in the room to help bend her to the group’s will.
As the papers settled into hands and both battered and battering eyes turned down to decipher the meaning hidden in the little black symbols, I launched into my presentation. It was nothing fancy, but I had rehearsed it a couple of times and knew most of it by heart. I started by restating the charge given to me and the department heads—redesign the company’s hiring process to focus on the qualities most associated with success. Then I described the process we followed, making sure to give full credit to the team for its creation and execution, and then I walked one by one through the resulting qualities and behaviors. I described how they could be used in the screening process for new hires and in the evaluation process for existing staff, and how those two systems would reinforce each other by bringing on people with the best qualities and rewarding those who demonstrated the best behaviors. I avoided all mention of a potential culture change in the organization, focusing instead on objectives of more palatable corporate sloganeering. I was a bit shameless, but by that point I was so deep into the presentation, and had been speaking for so long without interruption, I wasn’t sure anyone was really listening anymore. I had just described the proposed initiative as one allowing “better alignment with success vectors” when Mary interrupted me.
“Alan, can we go back for a second?”
“Of course,” I said.
“Tell me more about number eight.”
I looked down at the document in front of me, scanning down the page to the eighth quality we thought necessary for success in the company.
“Practices a healthy work/life balance?” I asked, seeking confirmation.
“Yes,” Mary said. “What does that mean?”
“What?”
“Work/life balance,” Mary said slowly, her lips forming the words as if they were foreign to her tongue. “What does that mean exactly?”
I looked at her blankly across the table and again felt the pervasive silence that filled the room whenever she or I stopped talking. There were eight of us shut up in that windowless room—six department heads with me and Mary, all of them supervisors and leaders in the company—but for all the noise they were making they could have just as easily been store mannequins.
“A work/life balance?” I said, afraid of where this was going but trying to be brave. “That’s when...uh, that’s when...”
I looked down at the document in front of me, searching desperately for an answer. And, of course, the answers were there. Twelve of them, in fact. That’s exactly what our exercise had been all about—coming up with answers. There were twelve observable behaviors associated with Quality Number Eight, every one of them a perfectly good definition for what it meant to have a healthy work/life balance.
Things like Shares information about pursuits outside of work.
And Manages workload appropriately within standard business hours.
And Takes and encourages others to take all earned vacation time.
But as I went through the list, I rejected each one of these definitions in turn, knowing that none of them stood a chance against Mary’s warped view of work and life. I looked back up at her with my mouth hanging open. I didn’t know what to say.
And Mary wasn’t the type to miss such an opportunity. “I mean, after all,” she said, setting the hook now that I had taken her bait, “the words ‘work’ and ‘life’ mean different things to different people, don’t they? We all have different life situations. And different sets of job responsibilities. Some of us are married and some are single. Some have kids and some don’t. Some jobs require out-of-town travel. Others demand evening hours spent entertaining clients. It’s just not clear to me what ‘work/life balance’ means in an environment like ours.”
This was bad. She was making a frontal assault on what I saw as the most important quality we had come up with—the one we really needed if we had any hope of changing the culture in this screwed-up company. I looked around the table to see if any of the department heads were even listening, to see if they saw what Mary was trying to do. Most still looked ready to crawl under the table, but I felt ennobled by what I saw as support from my two main co-conspirators. The look on Gerald's face still clearly told me to fight back, and Bethany looked so concerned I thought she might drift into a panic attack if I didn’t do something.
“Mary,” I said quickly, before she could continue with her self-fulfilling prophecy, “are you saying that, whatever the individual’s situation, maintaining a healthy balance between personal and professional interests is not something we should encourage our employees to strive for?”
She’s not going to answer that. I knew it before the words were even completely out of my mouth. She was sick, I knew, but she wasn’t stupid. If she agreed, if she said that we all should seek balance—well, that would be a lie so transparent that not even her most snowblind sycophants could pretend that they believed it. But if she disagreed, if she said balance was unimportant, she would be saying that openly and in front of her whole management team—a team that had brought that very subject to her as something they believed necessary for success. What kind of message would that send? No, I had maneuvered her so that she couldn’t oppose this directly, but since the spirit of what we were trying to do ran so diametrically against what she stood for, I knew she would try to find some other way to kill it.
“What I’m saying, Alan, is that I don’t think there is a consistent way to measure this quality in our environment. All of the others—showing initiative and solving problems, for example—yes, I can wrap my head around those. They’re all clear and can be universally applied throughout the company.” She suddenly pitched her voice to the team, as if recognizing their presence for the first time. “You’ve all done an excellent job with those and I thank you all for your efforts.”
Oh shit, I thought, realizing that the change in Mary’s tone meant we were getting the brush off, and so was our vision for work/life balance.
“The team feels pretty strongly about the whole list,” I said, keeping my eyes on Mary but trying to get some sense of the team’s support in my peripheral vision. “Even the one about work/life balance. They all came out of the same process and are interconnected with each other. Dropping any one of them would be leaving something essential out of the mix.”
Mary did not even hesitate. “Really?” she said. “Is that true?” she asked the table. “The other ten seem perfectly acceptable to me. Who else here agrees with Alan?”
To my great dismay, but not surprise, the death-like silence descended on us again. In that moment it reminded me of Conrad’s darkness—the underlying natural state of the universe—and I knew that it was only my voice, like the light of civilization, that was momentarily holding it at bay. I looked around the table, searching for a comrade to go up the river with me, but knew there wouldn’t be any volunteers. Even Gerald looked suddenly skeptical, the defiance I had previously seen replaced with the undeniable calculation of someone now deciding which horse to hook his wagon to.
“Gerald?” I said woefully, knowing I had to try, knowing even though none of them would speak up, they would all blame me if I didn’t try. “Bethany?” I said, now calling the two of them by name and in turn, calling those out who had been most behind me in this, the ones with whom I had dared to share some part of my vision for cultural change.
Nothing.
In the end, it was Scott who spoke—Scott Nelson, Mary’s hand-picked successor to head the accounting department. Scott, the sniveling little toady, who I now realized had remained mostly silent throughout our process, and who, I remembered, had signed on to our merry group of mutineers more out of professional curiosity than out of any inner drive to change anything. What was it he had said at our first meeting, I wondered, when doubts were strong and I had to call people to account in order to see where their loyalties were?
Let’s see where this thing goes.
Yeah, Scott. Let’s see indeed.
“Alan,” he began, and I blanched just from the fact that he was addressing me and not Mary. “I think Mary’s right on this one.” Of course you do. “The other ten are so strong, so exactly what we need, but this work/life balance thing, it’s fuzzy, it’s too hard to define, it can only be subjectively applied, and that’s not what we want at all.”
I wanted to call Scott a traitor, or at least an idiot for his typically fragmented way of speaking, but I knew it wouldn’t do any good. Checkmate, Mary had won, and it didn’t matter if I beat up on Scott or not. No one around that table thought Quality Number Eight was worth fighting for, perhaps believing in a way I didn’t that any ten out of the eleven qualities was victory enough, and without their support I didn’t stand a chance. But more importantly, it wasn’t true. Scott wasn’t a traitor. In that moment, I knew all he had ever been was a mole.
I bowed my head, not admitting defeat, but recognizing that it was not possible to keep fighting.
A smile passed over Mary’s face. Her victory now complete, the dragon would want to flaunt her power over those she had vanquished. “Besides,” she said. “Eleven is such an odd number. It will work so much better if there are only ten. Don’t you think?”
I most certainly didn’t, but when the heads started nodding around the table, I found myself conforming.
+ + +
“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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