crisis

The Strangest First Day on the Job I Ever Had

June 3, 2026 By Glynn Young 2 Comments

I felt more than a little apprehension. I was in morning rush hour traffic, driving to downtown St. Louis from the close-in suburb where I lived. It was something of a new experience. I hadn’t driven in rush-hour traffic since leaving Houston 25 years earlier. The apprehension wasn’t about traffic; I had stepped outside my career experience and accepted a job with St. Louis Public Schools. And I was early; the hours were 8 to 5, but I decided to be there by 7:30.

Except for nine months at a newspaper straight out of college, my career had been exclusively corporate communications: employee communications, crisis communications, media relations, environmental communications, and speechwriting. Especially speechwriting. Even for the three years I had had my own consulting business, I worked for companies, doing mostly speechwriting.

Corporations have their moments of craziness and crisis, but they pale in comparison to urban school districts. And yet, here I was, driving to my first day on the job at the largest school district in the state of Missouri, a district that had been in crisis for years and was now in hyper-crisis.

An outside management team has been authorized to take over and try to fix the massive problems the district faced – financial, academic, structural. The management team had been tasked with smashing an entrenched bureaucracy, and the bureaucracy – and all the outside people supporting it – was fighting back.

I was allowing myself to walk right into it. I’d already had the strangest job interview I’d ever had, and now I would have the strangest first day on the job I’d ever had.

*Photograph by Charles Deluvio via Unsplash*.

I parked in the district’s garage, a short walk across a plaza from the headquarters building. I followed my instructions, introduced myself to the security team at the entrance, and accompanied one of the armed guards to a small room off the lobby, where I had my picture taken and badge created. Then I took the stairs to the second floor, where my office was said to be. Someone directed me toward the side of the building overlooking North 11^th Street. The office was quite nice, just like any corporate office, and with a door. It was next to my boss’s office, but she was in an offsite meeting with all the other senior officials.

The secretary told me that I was supposed to go to Human Resources to fill out the required forms, but she said there was something else I needed to do first. Channel 5 News had asked for an interview about the teachers’ sickout.

“The teachers are having a sickout?” I said.

She nodded. “I think it has to do with changes to pensions. But they say it’s not a sickout, only hat a lot of teachers have called in sick.”

I went looking for someone to give me the background and find out what the district’s response was. I found the HR department down on the first floor, but no one there admitted to knowing anything. Someone in the academic department might know something, they said. I started looking around the building. That’s when I began to see some of the changes that had arrived.

The part of the second floor near my office was empty. There were fully equipped desks in cubicles, with tape dispensers, staplers, paper, and other office supplies, but no people. This had been the 12-member communication department. Now it was me and a half-headcount I hadn’t met yet. The people in Finance couldn’t help. No one in the academic department could say anything, because the top officials were in that offsite meeting.

The third and top floor was entirely empty except for a broadcast studio; the technician told me he was glad to meet me, his new boss. No one had mentioned that I was responsible for the broadcast studio. I would shortly learn that I was also responsible for the photography studio and archives, housed in one of the schools that had been closed. I found out that day when the district’s photographer showed up in my office to meet his new boss.

Back on the second floor, I stopped by the secretary’s desk to ask a question everyone had been vague about. What was my discretionary budget? She rather cheerfully told me that it it had been close to $1 million, but that had been reduced to $20,000. “But don’t worry about it,” she said. “The $20,000 has already been spent.”

The budget was zero. My job had become even more interesting.

I finally found someone who knew about the sick-leave policy and the issue, but they would not go on the record and never in front of a camera. I would soon learn that tended to be the official position of virtually everyone who worked for the school district – people universally saw the news media as one-way tickets to dismissal. The person did say the policy was that sickouts were illegal; people participating in them were subject to dismissal. I was warned that the principals would likely protect their staff and deny anyone had called in sick. I tested that with two principals. The assessment had been correct.

As my first hour on the job ended, I walked downstairs and outside to do an interview with Channel 5. Channels 2, 4, 11, and 30 followed. Then the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and the St. Louis American. The St. Louis Business Journal. The Riverfront Times. Several radio stations, including two independents.

That morning, I learned that I had to help TV reporters find a different location around the building so that televised reports wouldn’t look the same. That, as part of his job covering the school district, the Post-Dispatch reporter possessed and monitored a police radio. (The Post-Dispatch building was half a block away.) That School Board members, administrators, principals, and teachers all leaked like sieves to the media, parents, critics, protestors, and anyone else who’d listen.

*Photograph by Scott Graham via Unsplash*.

In between interviews, I received my first phone call. It was from the St. Louis Mayor’s office, providing my “suggested” instructions for the day. I would discover that this would happen three or four times a week. The Mayor’s office was not connected in any official way to the school district. I suppose it’s okay to note now that I received my instructions politely and then ignored them. But I appreciated the effort.

By noon, I had a little time to go to HR and fill out my forms. I completed them in a small conference room and returned them to a secretary. It would be weeks before anyone owned up to those forms getting lost. The people involved knew the forms had been lost, but they were afraid to say anything it. I figured it out when I didn’t receive my first two paychecks.

More interviews followed. Lunch that day happened around 3 p.m. when I found a vending machine that I had to get Security to operate because there had been too many break-ins and thefts. Yes, right there in the headquarters building, presumably by people who worked there. What had been the district’s small cafeteria had been closed in one of the restructurings that had already happened.

Toward the end of the day, the secretary brought me a catalog to order office supplies. I mentioned that I’d seen the fully supplied cubicles nearby, and couldn’t I simply take some of what was there? She looked almost horrified. “But don’t you want new supplies?” she said. I said I would scavenge first, and if I needed anything else, I’d let her know. She looked at me like I was a graverobber.

By 5 p.m., I was exhausted. The administrators had all returned from the offsite meeting, and I was able to greet several of them, including the acting superintendent, the man who’d yelled at me in the interview. He had a small team of two or three people he’d brought with him; one of them would become an island of sanity in what was clearly the craziest workplace I’d ever walked into.

If I’d only known what was ahead, I might not have come back after what had been the stranngest, most hectic first day on the job I’d ever experienced.

Related:

The Strangest Job Interview I Ever Had.

Top photograph by St. Louis Public Schools.

The Poetry of the Crisis

August 23, 2020 By Glynn Young Leave a Comment

There’s nothing like a good crisis to demonstrate how little control an organization has. There’s also nothing like a good crisis to uncover the poetry in our souls.

A product cancellation was looming, the cancellation to be imposed by a government agency. Thousands of jobs were at stake, not to mention income, corporate stock price, reputation, and significant disruptions for customers. The crisis had been coming for nearly a year, contained within official communications between the government and the company.

As time passed, internal anxiety grew. In the communications area, we were a relatively minor player, except for the moment at which the crisis would go public. Then we would occupy the most important position in the overall situation. Blow it there, and the product would be destroyed in the marketplace.

What ultimately led to a successful resolution was a recognition that the government’s concerns had to be addressed. That moved the company from a “scorched earth and fight them everywhere” approach to “what can we do and offer to resolve those concerns.” The company, and the people responsible for overall management of the issue, reached deep into their souls, and developed what turned out to be a significant innovation in product management.

One of the top business managers believed the whole thing was a crock – that the government would never cancel the product. And he really didn’t like the communications plan, and the resources that had to be put into place to pull off what would amount to an internal revolution. He didn’t actively try to stop anything, but he made his opinion known far and wide in the organization, including that “no one would care except trade press.” That made our work a lot more difficult.

The government accepted the company’s plan for the product. The news went public two days before Thanksgiving. It was a tidal wave of media interest. We had done well to prepare for an onslaught, and even then, it wasn’t enough. I lived on the phone with news media calls for the next two days – 12- and 14-hour days of saying the same things over and over. I was never more thankful for Thanksgiving, bit as soon as it was over, the phone calls resumed. Media interest finally calmed but continued for weeks. It was a very fine line that had to be walked – acknowledge the government’s concern as legitimate and simultaneously defend the product’s safety.

Some weeks later, I was attending a dinner that was part of a training session for salespeople in a small town in Iowa. Some 250 of our sales representatives were in the audience, and the business manager who had been the chief naysayer was the dinner speaker. I didn’t know what he was going to say, but I was a wee bit apprehensive that the naysaying would continue.

It didn’t. What he said was this: “From the beginning, I believed this was a tempest in a teapot, that we were exaggerating things all out of proportion. I was wrong. I can tell you tonight that all that stood between us and disaster was a tiny handful of PR people. And they pulled it off.” I was the only PR person from the team at the dinner, and every face in the room turned to me.

A crisis had forced the organization to pull the poetry from its soul. It was literally an act of saving grace.

From Poetry at Work: “Crises are the poetry of surprise, upset, and human frailty. They are often the poetry of organizational change, the poetry of the disruption of the status quo. They can speak powerfully to an organization’s managers and people, and they can also fall of deaf ears. Crises expose our humanity, both flawed and good; our limitations and potential reach; our courage, and our fears. And they do all of these things simultaneously.”

This article was prepared for the Literary Life Book of the Month discussion group on Facebook.

Top photograph by Ante Hamersmit via Unsplash. Used with permission.

The Poetry of the Boss

August 14, 2020 By Glynn Young 1 Comment

More than 40 years ago, I was handed my college diploma and, two days later, showed up for work at my first official job. I didn’t realize it until much later, but I walked into the doors of my employer that day carrying an assumption. I believed that people in positions of authority – bosses – always knew what they were doing. Why else would they be bosses?

Slightly more than a decade later, my assumption continuing to take body blow after body blow, I was presented incontrovertible evidence that my assumption had been flat-out wrong.

A group of us were sitting in a conference room, waiting for the news to go public that one of the company’s top products had a problem. The first indication would be the stock market. We all knew the news was imminent, and we had prepared for it as if a tsunami was about to strike, which, metaphorically, turned out to be true. The call came, confirming that the news was public, and for a very brief moment we experienced a silence.

We were all a bit shook, but I knew we were prepared. We had thought through all kinds of scenarios. We had planned for every eventuality. The pace of the planning had been exhausting for weeks. But I knew we were ready, as ready as any company could possibly be.

And then the executive to whom we had all looked for leadership, for guiding us through what would become a very difficult time, spoke. “What do we tell our people?” he said. “What do we tell our customers?” His voice was filled with emotion. He was nearly in tears.

We were all a bit stunned. And then my immediate boss, sitting next to me, looked at me and said, “Go!” That was the signal. Without excusing myself, I bolted from the room, ran to the building next door, and found the team of people waiting. Everyone knew exactly what they were to do. And all I did was repeat my own boss’s word. “Go!”

Statements were issued. Communications were sent to customer organizations. Media calls were made and returned. Faxes were sent. (This happened in the days before email and electronic communications.) This would be my life for the next week, interrupted only by the Thanksgiving holiday, and it would continue for the next month.

But in that brief moment at the very beginning, I had seen two extremes of leadership. A senior executive’s worst fears had happened, and he foundered. My own boss, well down the corporate totem pole, had given me a one-word command, a simple word that was like a hyperlink to a massive amount of preparation and a plan to be implemented.

Later I would come to explain it to myself as a kind of epic poem. It was as if Beowulf didn’t slay Grendl, but instead had fallen, replaced by a younger, less-experienced subordinate who went on to slay the monster. The world as that executive had known it had come to a rather abrupt end, and he didn’t know how to navigate his way, or ours, going forward. We were going to have to invent what that way would be.

My assumption about bosses died that day. A few years later, struggling to lead my own team through the unchartered waters of corporate upheaval, I read The Heart Aroused: Poetry and the Preservation of the Corporate Soul in Americaby poet David Whyte. And I realized that poetry could be more of a guide that all of the management science and self-help books put together.

From Poetry at Work, Chapter 5: It is the soul—that place in the depths of our existence—where storms often rage, and chaos is more the norm than the exception. We don’t just bring our skills, talents, experience, and physical bodies to the workplace; we also bring our souls, as much as systems management tries to deny and fight it.

Top photograph by Ameer Basheer via Unsplash. Used with permission.

This article was prepared for the Literary Life Book of the Month discussion group on Facebook.

Poetry at Work, Chapter 13: The Poetry of the Crisis

April 8, 2019 By Glynn Young Leave a Comment

There’s nothing like a good crisis to demonstrate how little control an organization has. There’s also nothing like a good crisis to uncover the poetry in our souls.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Literary Life.

A Novel about a Crisis

October 3, 2018 By Glynn Young 1 Comment

More than once, my wife has pointed out that my 2017 novel Dancing King and my new novel Dancing Prophet tend to pick on the Anglican Church, and specifically the Church of England.

It’s a fair point; the major tension in Dancing King is between the king, Michael Kent-Hughes, and the Church of England hierarchy at Lambeth Palace. Michael is speaking at churches for the need for reformation, and then makes a blow-out speech at a conference of bishops. Lambeth strikes back, however, employing all sorts of stratagems and accusations.

In Dancing Prophet, scandal erupts. What looks contained to one church is actually broader and deeper, involving churches and dioceses across the country and well beyond. The introductory sentence reads this way: “The match that ignited the reformation of the Church of England was lit by three teenagers.”

The heart of this story was written more than a decade ago, and then rewritten (many times) over the years. In one sense I did pick on the Church of England – the idea of the scandal in Dancing Prophet is actually inspired by the real institutional crisis the Catholic Church has been struggling with. In the story, Michael will realize that the situation is beyond reformation; the church as he’s known it is gone.

Dancing Prophet is fiction, but like all fiction, it can’t help but reflect the times in which it’s written. When the history of our times comes to be written, it may be title (or subtitled) “The Age of Institutional Crisis.” Our government structures aren’t working; the sorry spectacle of a U.S. Senator questioning a candidate for the Supreme Court about the references to body noises in his high school yearbook isn’t even funny as much as it is tragic.

Our language has become the language of extremes, suggesting a mutual contempt that’s hard for me to fathom. I’ve stopped reading the editorial and op-ed pages of my hometown newspaper; there’s virtually nothing in it that one could call a reasoned argument. Lots of polemics, to be sure; lots of barely disguised contempt for any opinion, belief, or value other than what the editorial and op-ed writers agree with. Snark rules.

The church universal is in crisis as well. Mainline Protestant denominations in the United States are in membership free fall. Evangelical megachurches are afflicted by their leaders abusing women and elder boards refusing to believe it, until significant damage is done. The Catholic Church is being torn apart. This looks like a winnowing of the church to me, a winnowing that will leave a smaller and perhaps stronger church.

This isn’t the time for reasoned arguments. This is the time for rule by the mob. I watch the news coverage, and I see the mob racing through the halls of Congress, screaming at senators and congressman. This is rhetorical violence approaching physical violence.

Some have compared this to the declining days of the Roman Empire; it’s closer, I think, to the declining days of the Roman Republic.

This is the world partially depicted in Dancing Prophet. Michael Kent-Hughes has been thrust into a position he never expected and never sought. He is not only dealing with ecclesiastical failure; he is also dealing with politicians increasingly reluctant to take responsibility and a London governing authority that ceases to work due to political disfunction.

Early in the story, two of the leading characters in Dancing Prophet are discussing how Michael came to occupy his position. Here was Michael, with no military background, no royal upbringing, and in fact nothing to recommend him for the position of king. He was a Church of England priest, and a young one at that, without any hierarchal experience.

And here’s what one of the characters says:

“God picks the man needed for the job at hand. And isn’t it fascinating that Michael had essentially been exiled to the hinterlands as a child, reared completely away from anything even remotely royal, felt called into the priesthood when he was relatively young, and was then sent to the outer edges of the Anglican world, away from the center and all that the center implied. God was preparing Michael, as surely as you and I are sitting here. And He was less interested in military and palace experience and far more interested in raising up a man after His own heart.”

And that’s the hope of Dancing Prophet, that even in the darkest times, God is raising up men and women after His own heart.

Top photograph by Micah Williams via Unsplash, and lower photograph by Oliver Sjostrom, also via Unsplash. Used with permission.

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