Top Takes: Moving the Goal Posts

Take another look at the post that, as of this writing, has the tenth most pageviews on this entire blog:

Moving the Goal Posts

In it, I talk about the situations in which "moving the goal posts," that is, changing the metrics by which the success of a program or strategic initiative is determined, is necessary.

These situations are marked, I've found, by the need for the association to learn more about the environment it is entering before it can successfully identify the true markers of success. In other words, you leap into an external environment with one understanding of what is needed, necessarily calibrating the program defining/metric tracking piece of your operation with that understanding, only to discover that, once you are in the thick of implementing those plans, that different tactics, and sometimes, a different strategy, are needed in order to achieve success.

It is not for the faint of heart. But, in these situations, keeping the goal posts where they are means turning what might be your organization's greatest endeavor into a make-work exercise.

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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.

Dragons - Chapter 23 (DRAFT)

The meeting did not go well.

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.

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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.

Image Source
http://lres.com/heres-why-amcs-need-to-pay-close-attention-to-looming-regulatory-changes/businessman-in-the-middle-of-a-labyrinth/

Top Takes: A Night to Remember by Walter Lord

Take another look at the post that, as of this writing, has the ninth most pageviews on this entire blog:

A Night to Remember by Walter Lord

Written in 1955, this is both a detailed accounting of the sinking of the Titanic and, much more interestingly for me, and reflective essay on the death of one set of cultural norms, a way of life that had already been losing traction, but which lost all its footing in the wake of the disaster.

Lord beautifully describes how a cultural preoccupation with wealth quickly became a casualty of the Titanic disaster. To fully understand this, to understand the world as it now exists, it is often helpful to first understand the world as it used to be.

It was easier in the old days … for the Titanic was also the last stand of wealth and society in the center of public affection. In 1912 there were no movie, radio or television stars; sports figures were still beyond the pale; and cafe society was completely unknown. The public depended on socially prominent people for all the vicarious glamour that enriches drab lives.

This preoccupation was fully appreciated by the press. When the Titanic sailed, the New York Times listed the prominent passengers on the front page. After she sank, the New York American broke the news on April 16 with a lead devoted almost entirely to John Jacob Astor; at the end it mentioned that 1,800 others were also lost.

In the same mood, the April 18 New York Sun covered the insurance angle of the disaster. Most of the story concerned Mrs. Widener’s pearls.

Never again did established wealth occupy people’s minds so thoroughly. On the other hand, never again was wealth so spectacular. John Jacob Astor thought nothing of shelling out 800 dollars for a lace jacket some dealer displayed on deck when the Titanic stopped briefly at Queenstown. To the Ryersons there was nothing unusual about traveling with 16 trunks. The 190 families in First Class were attended by 23 handmaids, eight valets, and assorted nurses and governesses--entirely apart from hundreds of stewards and stewardesses. These personal servants had their own lounge on C Deck, so that no one need suffer the embarrassment of striking up a conversation with some handsome stranger, only to find he was Henry Sleeper Harper’s dragoman.

This was truly not just another time, but another world.

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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.

The Magician by W. Somerset Maugham

This is an early novel of Maugham’s, first published in 1908. Here’s what the author himself says about it in the “fragment of autobiography” that he wrote when it was republished in 1956.

When, a little while ago, my publisher expressed a wish to re-issue it, I felt that, before consenting to this, I really should read it again. Nearly fifty years had passed since I had done so, and I had completely forgotten it. Some authors enjoy reading their old works; some cannot bear to. Of these I am. When I have corrected the proofs of a book, I have finished with it for good and all. I am impatient when people insist on talking to me about it; I am glad if they like it, but do not much care if they don’t. I am no more interested in it than a worn-out suit of clothes that I have given away.

Let me cut in hear and say that this author, for one, feels exactly as Maugham describes himself here -- something I shouldn’t forget now that I’ve decided to post the chapters of my latest novel on this blog. But what about The Magician itself? What does Maugham say about it?

It was thus with disinclination that I began to read The Magician. It held my interest, as two of my early novels, which for the same reason I have been obliged to read, did not. … As I read The Magician, I wondered how on earth I could have come by all the material concerning the black arts which I wrote of. I must have spent days and days reading in the library of the British Museum. The style is lush and turgid, not at all the sort of style I approve of now, but perhaps not unsuited to the subject; and there are a great many more adverbs and adjectives than I should use to-day. I fancy I must have been impressed by the ecriture artiste which the French writers of the time had not yet entirely abandoned, and unwisely sought to imitate them.

Maugham makes it sound like a youthful indiscretion, but one which the adult that had grown from that youth doesn’t entirely regret. I can say that it is an unusual Maugham novel, primarily in its subject matter, but clearly a Maugham novel nonetheless -- with all the structural and character-driven craftsmanship that I’ve come to expect from this, one of my favorite authors. To make a modern comparison, it’s like a lost season of Downton Abbey in which the Crawley family get mixed up in necromancy and starts summoning demons.

He pointed to the covering which still hid the largest of the vases. He had a feeling that it contained the most fearful of all these monsters; and it was not without an effort that he drew the cloth away. ...

This is from the last chapter of the novel, in a passage where all is being revealed. The titular Magician is an obese man named Oliver Haddo, a fictional character evidently based on Maugham’s own acquaintance with Aleister Crowley, who, coming to cross purposes with a young British surgeon and his fiancee, bewitches and comes to possess the young woman's mind with his black magic.

… But no sooner had he done this than something sprang up, so that instinctively he started back, and it began to gibber in piercing tones. These were the unearthly sounds that they had heard. …

In this passage, “he” is that young British surgeon, Arthur Burdon. His fiancee, Margaret Dauncey, has already been murdered by Haddo, and Burdon and Haddo have had a death struggle in which Burdon believes he has killed Haddo, but after which no evidence of Haddo’s corpse has remained.

… It was not voice, it was a kind of raucous crying, hoarse yet shrill, uneven like the barking of a dog, and appalling. The sounds came forth in rapid succession, angrily, as though the being that uttered them sought to express itself in furious words. …

Now Burdon is searching Haddo’s apparently abandoned mansion with two companions, and has found the magician’s secret laboratory, in which his necromancy has reached its horrifying apogee in the existence of these misshapen creatures of elemental life.

… It was mad with passion and beat against the glass walls of its prison with clenched fists. For the hands were human hands, and the body, though much larger, was of the shape of a new-born child. The creature must have stood about four feet high. The head was horribly misshapen. The skull was enormous, smooth and distended like that of a hydrocephalic, and the forehead protruded over the face hideously. The features were almost unformed, preternaturally small under the great, over-hanging brow; and they had an expression of fiendish malignity. …

It is for this that we learn Margaret was sacrificed, her lifeforce first feeding Haddo’s voracious vanity and then his demonic creations.

… The tiny, misshapen countenance writhed with convulsive fury, and from the mouth poured out a foaming spume. It raised its voice higher and higher, shrieking senseless gibberish in its rage. Then it began to hurl its whole body madly against the glass walls and to beat its head. It appeared to have a sudden incomprehensible hatred for the three strangers. It was trying to fly at them, the toothless gums moving spasmodically, and it threw its face into horrible grimaces. That nameless, loathsome abortion was the nearest that Oliver Haddo had come to the human form.

I’ve quoted this passage at length because I think it is an excellent example of the "lush and turgid" prose that Maugham evidently regretted having written. It is clearly replete with the kind of adverbs and adjectives used more frequently in the cosmic horror genre to bring the surreal and unfathomable into some semblance of squishy and base reality.

But not all of the novel is like this. Prior to this, it reads more like a psychological thriller, as neither the reader nor any of the characters truly know the extent of Haddo’s powers over Margaret and the structured world she inhabits. Much of it is described from Margaret's point of view, painfully revealing the tensions of her conflicted mind.

Then Margaret felt every day that uncontrollable desire to go to him; and, though she tried to persuade herself not to yield, she knew that her effort was only a pretense: she did not want anything to prevent her. When it seemed that some accident would do so, she could scarcely control her irritation. There was always that violent hunger of the soul which called her to him, and the only happy hours she had were those spent in his company. Day after day she felt that complete ecstasy when he took her in his huge arms, and kissed her with his heavy, sensual lips. But the ecstasy was extraordinarily mingled with loathing, and her physical attraction was allied with physical abhorrence.

Yet when he looked at her with those pale blue eyes, and threw into his voice those troubling accents, she forgot everything. He spoke of unhallowed things. Sometimes, as it were, he lifted a corner of the veil, and she caught a glimpse of terrible secrets. She understood how men had bartered their souls for infinite knowledge. She seemed to stand upon a pinnacle of the temple, and spiritual kingdoms of darkness, principalities of the unknown, were spread before her eyes to lure her to destruction. But of Haddo himself she learned nothing. She did know know if he loved her. She did not know if he had ever loved. He appeared to stand apart from human kind.

It is the dark temptation of Margaret’s soul that Haddo is able to first appeal to, then capture, then bend to his diabolical purpose. And the slow, structured descent that Maugham offers in this novel of youthful indiscretion is a true pleasure to read.

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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.

Top Takes: Moral Politics by George Lakoff

Take another look at the post that, as of this writing, has the eighth most pageviews on this entire blog:

Moral Politics by George Lakoff

In this book the author presents a theory about how political liberals and conservatives think; a theory that basically has two parts. One, people’s political attitudes are driven by their underlying morality and, in America, there are two basic moral frameworks at play, both arising out of different view of the family.

Conservatism, as we shall see, is based on a Strict Father model [of the family], while liberalism is centered around a Nurturant Parent model. These two models of the family give rise to different moral systems and different discourse forms, that is, different choices of words and different modes of reasoning.

And two, these family-based moral systems are relevant to political opinions because of the widespread view of the Nation through the metaphor of a family.

The link between family-based morality and politics comes from one of the most common ways we have of conceptualizing what a nation is, namely, as a family. It is the common, unconscious, and automatic metaphor of the Nation-as-Family that produces contemporary conservatism from Strict Father morality and contemporary liberalism from Nurturant Parent morality.

It's a fascinating read, with a lot of unexpected twists and turns along the way, especially when Lakoff attempts to argue for one of the two moral systems are the "right" way to approach political questions. But beware the false equivalency embedded in his approach. Since the Nation-As-Family metaphor is, at best, an approximation of reality, it's not fair to condemn one moral system because it more frequently fails in raising well-adjusted children.

To wit, Strict Father morality may be a horrible way to raise children. But is it a horrible way of running a country?

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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.

Dragons - Chapter 22 (DRAFT)

On Monday morning there was a voicemail waiting for me when I got into the office—from Ruthie, not from Mary herself—letting me know that Mary had picked a specific time for our staff qualities meeting. She wanted to meet at 11 AM on Tuesday, Ruthie said, and she was looking forward to reviewing our progress.

Okay, I remember thinking. Good. Not perfect, but good. I can do the interview with Quest Partners at ten and be done in time for the eleven o’clock meeting with Mary. I’d have to go somewhere close, though. Maybe down to The Cellar? No, not below ground with all that concrete. There won’t be any cell phone reception. Maybe just the park across the street? Yeah, that’s it. I’ll just go sit in the park and keep an eye on my watch.

But none of these carefully wrought plans worked. At 9:06 AM on the fateful Tuesday morning, my office phone rang and the caller ID window showed my home number.

“Hello?”

“Alan?” Jenny’s angry voice said. “What are you doing?”

“I’m working,” I said. “What do you think I’m doing?”

“Why didn’t you call Pamela for your interview? She just called here looking for you.”

I quickly looked at the clock to verify the time. “The interview’s at 10 o’clock,” I said. “It’s just after nine now. Does she want to move it up?”

“It’s ten o’clock her time,” Jenny said scathingly. “You’re late. You’d better call her right now.”

“Oh, shit,” I said, grabbing a pen. “Give me the number.”

“Don’t you have it?” she shouted.

I hadn’t written the appointment on my calendar. All of my notes for the interview were in a file in my briefcase. “I do, but just give it to me again, dammit.”

She recited the numbers with stark clarity, enunciating each one as if it was a score on her side of the tally. When I had them I thanked her curtly and pressed the receiver button before she could respond. Releasing the button and getting a dial tone, I punched in the numbers slowly, making sure I got each one right, and waited through three rings before the line picked up.

“Hello, Pamela Thornsby.”

“Pamela? This is Alan Larson calling.”

“Alan,” Pamela said, sounding relieved again but just a bit more skeptical than before. “Good. You got my message. Was there some kind of mix-up on the time for our interview?”

“There was,” I confirmed. “And it was all my fault. When we said ten o’clock I thought we were talking Central time.”

“Ah. I should have clarified. Is this still a good time for you?”

“Um, yes…” I said, looking up and realizing that my office door was standing open. “Yes, this is fine. Can you give me one moment to shut my door?”

“Of course.”

I put the phone down and darted across the small room. This wasn’t what I wanted at all. I didn’t want to do this interview in the office but now I didn’t have a choice. Bethany suddenly appeared in my door’s long window pane, holding her manicured fingers up and stopping me from shutting it tight.

I quickly pulled it back open. “What?” I said.

Bethany looked back and forth in both directions, the hustle and bustle of the office going on full speed behind her, and then leaned in closer to me and spoke in a low voice. “Let me in. There’s something I have to tell you.”

The memory of our suggestive weekend text messages was still fresh in my mind, and my first thought was that she playing a similar kind of game.

“Oh god, not now, Bethany,” I said. “I’m on a call.”

Bethany looked quickly past me and my gaze followed hers to the telephone receiver lying as if forgotten on my desk, its kinky spiral leash tethering it to its home unit.

“But something’s going on,” she said out of the corner of her mouth. “Michael’s in Mary’s office and Ruthie’s keeping a close guard on the door.”

I craned my neck to see over the multiple spider-like workstation pods that stood between my office door and Mary’s. By lining myself up just right, I could see Ruthie sitting at her desk, sorting through a stack of envelopes, her eyes flicking up to scan the space around her every few seconds, and Mary’s golden veneer door shut tightly behind her.

“Okay,” I said, not knowing if I should be concerned or not. “I can’t deal with it right now. I have to be on this call.” I started closing the door again.

“But there’s more!” Bethany said, gripping the edge of the door to keep it open.

“I’ll come find you as soon as my call is done,” I said, forcing the door closed. Momentarily noting the look of shock on her face, I quickly retrieved my file of interview notes, sat back down and scooped up the receiver.

“Pamela?” I said. “Are you still there?” My voice was little more than a paranoid whisper.

“Yes, Alan. I’m here,” Pamela’s strong voice echoed in my ear. “Are you ready to begin?”

With the fear of a criminal who knows he’ll be caught I twisted quickly in my chair and was relieved to see Bethany had removed herself from my doorway. Through the door’s glass panel there was a lot of office activity, but none of it seemed directed at me.

“Yes,” I said, reminding myself to relax and to focus on the task at hand. “Go ahead.”

As I would tell Jenny later, I did the best I could. Her cousin Tom, however, was right—I was out of practice and stumbled through the entire conversation. I think Pamela could sense she was catching me off my game, and she was kind enough to start with a few softball questions, but she had a script to get through and other candidates to consider, so eventually she started throwing some heat. I swung at every pitch as hard as I could, but never felt like I was making the right connection, never once feeling the satisfying chunk of solid wood on the ball.

I might’ve done better if I hadn’t been so distracted. Not just worried about getting caught interviewing for another job in the office, about ten minutes into the ordeal I realized my bladder was full of my morning coffee. Closing my eyes helped at first, but as the conversation wore on and my need to pee became more desperate, I had to squeeze back against the pressure with a firm grip on the front of my pants. It didn’t even occur to me to excuse myself for a minute or two—to tell her I needed a quick break or a drink of water or something. I just kept thinking it would end soon, but it didn’t. My answers to Pamela’s questions went from hurried to downright abrupt, my mind seemingly unable to focus on anything else except getting to the end and running down to the men’s room.

I checked the clock constantly, watching the minutes tick by in increasing discomfort, and nearly had a coronary about forty-five minutes in when I saw Mary Walton standing in my doorway like an apparition in pale worsted wool. Seeing that she had caught my attention, she quietly opened the door and poked her head inside. In the middle of one of Pamela’s difficult questions, I had no choice but to let the receiver drift away from my ear. I quickly lifted my hand away from my crotch and clapped it over the mouthpiece.

“Are you going to be much longer?” she whispered, reinforcing her question by tracing a growing timeline in the air with two retreating fingers.

I can only imagine what she must have been thinking. I’m sure my eyes were bugging out of my head and, as far as I knew, she had seen me clutching myself. Unable to speak, I rapidly nodded.

“We need to talk before our 11 AM meeting,” she said softly, tapping a fingernail on the face of her Cartier watch. “Come find me when you’re done.”

She backed out, shut the door and disappeared.

When the interview finally ended, at twenty minutes to eleven, I thanked Pamela as graciously as I could, then slammed the phone down. Stuffing my notes haphazardly under a pile of folders, I got up and walked as quickly but as discreetly as I could to the bathroom. A few people tried to catch me as I trotted past—Bethany being one of them—but I refused to make eye contact with them. Inside the mercifully empty men’s room, I spent the next two minutes draining my bladder, watching the urine swirl down the drain, and cursing myself for my abysmal performance.

I had blown it. After her first few “get to know you” questions, it felt like Pamela Thornsby had simply raked me over the coals—questioning my experience, challenging my assertions—and doing everything she could to paint me into a corner where I would be forced to admit I was unqualified for the job. Distracted by the abrupt transition to the interview itself, nervous about the risk of being overheard in my office surroundings, and mocked by my pathetically weak bladder, I had mumbled and bumbled my way through the thing like a stooge.

I pulled the flush handle on the top of the urinal, zipped up, and marched over to the row of sinks to wash my hands. They were mounted too low on the wall—almost like they belonged in an elementary school—and as I stood hunched over like an ogre, wringing the Borax-scented soap into my hands, my conspiracy-prone imagination began to think that Pamela might have planned something more than just a simple screening interview.

The whole thing could have been a set-up, I realized. They already had someone they wanted to bring on board, but the hired guns on the client’s legal team wanted the candidate vetted through a competitive search process. Happened all the time in my profession. Make sure you’re getting the best talent at the best price—that kind of thing. But Mr. Quest or whoever ran Quest Partners wanted to hire his brother-in-law, so all the other candidates had to get washed out, and Pamela, like the good little HR director she was, was only too happy to comply.

“Shit,” I said to myself in the mirror, thinking about how much sense that made, and then moved to dry my hands on the rough pieces of paper toweling that always seemed to disintegrate as soon as they got wet.

It was either that, I thought miserably, or I had just been subjected to my first bona fide stress interview. I’d heard about them before and knew I was bound to encounter one when I started interviewing for the top job. The examination had been real, and there was a job to be won, but Pamela hadn’t been interested in what I had to say—she only wanted to see how I would react under the heat lamps of an aggressive interrogation. If I couldn’t hold my own against a lowly staffer, after all, how could I deal with a bunch of power-hungry board members? This hypothesis made me feel even angrier at myself, but I told myself to calm down, because it didn’t really matter. Stress or sham—either way, there wasn’t a chance I would be called back for a second interview. So all I had to do was come up with a story to tell Jenny. She wouldn’t want to hear that I just plain fucked up.

Upon exiting the restroom, I was surprised to find Ruthie standing outside the door, clearly waiting for me.

“Mary wants to see you,” she said.

“Really?” I said sarcastically. “Why didn’t you come in and get me?”

She gave me one of her intolerant looks, but I blew past her, and headed straight for Mary’s office.

“Alan,” Mary said, seeing me in her doorway. “Come in, sit down.” She beckoned me with a lifeless hand but kept her eyes on her computer monitor, her other hand on her mouse, targeting more email to delete unread. I crossed the vast expanse of her office and sat in one of the visitor chairs opposite her desk. I didn’t close the door behind me because that was not the kind of thing you did unless Mary told you to. She publicly adhered to an “open door” policy whenever possible.

Mary turned in her chair to face me. “Have you heard?” she said softly.

“Heard?” I asked. “Heard what?”

“It happened almost an hour ago,” she said. “I would’ve thought you would’ve heard about it by now.”

“I was stuck on a call,” I said uncomfortably. “What’s going on?”

Mary looked up and following her gaze I saw Ruthie leaning against the doorframe, her arms folded across her chest as if waiting for some task to perform. My eyes lingered there for a moment, sweeping over the wide belt she wore and the long pleated skirt that covered her legs. When I turned back Mary was studying me intently, rolling the diamond pendant that hung from her necklace between her thumb and dominant fingers.

“Michael gave me his resignation this morning.”

“What?” I said, genuinely surprised. “When did he do that?”

“This morning,” Mary said again. “While you were on your call.”

“But I saw Michael this morning. We waited for the coffee to finish brewing in the break room together. He told me about his plans for the weekend. Why didn’t he say anything to me about resigning?”

“Well, that’s part of what we need to talk about,” Mary said. “But we’re coming up on our eleven o’clock with the department heads, so it might be better if we schedule some time later this afternoon. But you should know that we walked him out.”

“You did?” I said. “Didn’t he give any notice?”

Mary nodded. “But given his reason for leaving, I thought it was better to cut him loose and just pay him for the two weeks.”

It was hard to process what Mary was telling me. Michael had quit and was already gone—escorted out of the building like a murder suspect, probably carrying his handful of personal effects in one of the brown cardboard boxes Peggy Wilcox kept stashed in a corner of her office.

“What reason was that?”

Mary pursed her lips, as if trying to keep something noxious from escaping. Her eyes flicked again to Ruthie, and I thought she might ask her to close the door, but she didn’t.

“He said he quit because of you,” Mary said sternly. “He said you treat him like a child and let other staff people abuse him.”

I rolled my eyes. “Oh, come on.”

“It’s true, Alan. It’s what he said.”

“It might be what he said, but that doesn’t make it true.”

“Are you saying he lied?”

I opened my mouth to speak but stopped myself abruptly, letting the breath fall out in a heavy sigh. I shot a look at Ruthie, still standing like a statue in the doorway. “You mind shutting the door, Ruthie?”

Ruthie twitched like someone had goosed her, uncrossing her arms and taking her shoulder off the doorframe. She traded a cautionary glance with her boss, and only stepped out of the room when Mary gave her an approving nod.

“Look, Mary,” I said, lowering my voice even though the door was now closed. “Michael is a head-case. You know that as well as I do. He always thinks someone is out to ridicule him.”

“What happened at your last staff qualities meeting?”

“What?” I said.

“What happened at your last staff qualities meeting?” Mary repeated. “Michael said you humiliated him in front of all the department heads.”

I bit my lip, remembering some of the things I had said to Michael.

“Alan,” she said with disappointment. “You didn’t—did you?”

“He was acting like a child, Mary. The rest of the team was on board with what we were doing but he refused, sitting there and pouting like a spoiled brat. I gave him a swift kick in the pants.”

Her eyebrows flew up. “You did what?”

“Figuratively,” I cried. “I didn’t actually kick him.” I took a deep breath and changed my tone. “I told him to grow up and get with the program.”

She shook her head and I could feel the frustration coming off of her. “We’re going to have to discuss this more, but we don’t have time now.” She pointed to a golden engraved clock on her desk—another award she had accepted on behalf of one of our clients. “It’s nearly eleven. The department heads are probably already gathering in the conference room.”

She pushed her chair back, stood up, and began mindlessly arranging pens and loose pieces of paper on her desk as though she needed them to be a certain way before she could leave. I skooched to the edge of the visitor chair, my elbows up and my sweaty palms flat on the chair arms, but did not get up. “Maybe we should reschedule?” I said, feeling my heart thumping away in my chest.

“Reschedule what?” she said with disdain. “The staff qualities meeting?”

“Yeah,” I said slowly, realizing too late that I was stepping into a trap.

Mary stopped moving things around on her desk and looked at me coldly, her eyes hooded and suspicious, as if she thought she had caught me trying to pull a fast one on her.

“Why?” she said. “Aren’t you ready?”

Bitch. I smiled at her. “Of course, I am.”

“Well,” she said. “Let’s go, then.”

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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.

Image Source
http://lres.com/heres-why-amcs-need-to-pay-close-attention-to-looming-regulatory-changes/businessman-in-the-middle-of-a-labyrinth/

Top Takes: The Chief Detail Officer

Take another look at the post that, as of this writing, has the seventh most pageviews on this entire blog:

The Chief Detail Officer

In a linked TED talk, Rory Sutherland persuasively makes the case that organizations don't spend enough time working on the small stuff. That, in fact, there is a bias in most organizations that big problems have to be met with big solutions--solutions that have to be conceptualized by powerful people and executed with lots and lots of money.

Sutherland doesn't claim that approach won't work in some situations, but he comes out stridently for a different approach, embodied by something he calls the Chief Detail Officer, the CDO. This isn't the person responsible for coordinating all the details. It is the person responsible for finding small things that cost little that have tremendous impact and making sure they are done right and consistently.

I've seen the need for such an approach myself, and can cite at least one circumstance when some small detail meant a great deal to one of my association members.

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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.