Dancing Priest

Author and Novelist Glynn Young

work life

This Didn’t Happen to a Friend of Mine

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It showed up as a Facebook memory, a story I hadn’t thought about in years. I’d posted in August of 2009 on my blog and linked it from Facebook. The title was, “This Happened to a Friend of Mine.” The post received a grand total of one comment, from someone named “Anonymous.”

I started reading it. And I realize it hadn’t happened to a friend of mine. The premise was a variation of “asking for a friend.”

Seventeen years later, I’m not sure why I posted it. The situation had happened two months before. The account I posted was mostly true but not entirely, some things disguised or slightly changed to discuss what happened without pointing to specific people. It was an incredible difficult time, the kind of story that happens all the time in the corporate world but never makes LinkedIn. 

This is the account:

“Some time ago, this happened to a friend of mine.

“He was hired a few years back for a specific job at a non-profit organization, what at my company we’d call an “individual contributor” position. Gradually his skills and abilities led to more and more responsibility. He knew a lot of stuff, because he’d done a lot of stuff.

“He was kind of an oddball, something of an interloper working among people who had been there a long time. And, no surprise, his perspective was different from that of his colleagues. He saw and sensed things more quickly than others; he spotted trends with the eye (or heart) of a prophet. He would say things, disturbing or aggravating everyone in the room, and then be proven right, which is often worse than being wrong.

Photograph via Unsplash.

“But he was liked anyway. Quiet, dependable, extremely skilled and talented. Solid in a crisis. Adept at fixing messes. People generally forgave him the prophetic outbursts, which he did learn to keep under control. Mostly.

“The department he was in expanded, and he found himself leading a lot of people. He had a crazy idea about people. He believed people had the same intrinsic value and worth, because they were each made in the image of God (yeah, he was one of those types). He knew that people possessed different skills, talents and abilities, but those differences didn’t make them any less valuable in God’s eyes. And that’s how he managed, or tried to. He wasn’t a socialist; he differentiated among top and good and average and bad performers. But everyone knew he treated all of his people with respect. The team flourished, producing results that were outstanding, and advanced themselves, the organization and their profession in the process. It’s still an amazing story.

“Things were fine for a while, and then came one of those annual job reviews. Here’s what he was told by his boss:

“Outstanding performance. Great results.

“But, here’s what management thinks about you.

“You are not a good leader, because your people like working for you. That means you’re too soft.

“You’re old-fashioned. You don’t think like we do.

“You are good at too many things. That means you’re tactical, not strategic.

“Hard as it is to believe, given the performance and results of his team, that’s what he was told.

“Here’s what my friend said:

“I have to lead people in the way that’s central to me. I can’t and won’t browbeat them. Look at the results. Could that have happened by making people afraid?

“You’re right, I don’t think like you do. And that’s what makes me valuable.

“Being good at many things could mean that I can see things clearly from many different perspectives, that I may be the most strategic person you have.

“The discussion ended fine; there was no shouting or even defensiveness. (Not with a bang but a whimper, as T.S. Eliot said.) But my friend was shaken.

“He asked me what I thought, since I knew him well. I said that if his review was typical for others in his organization, then his organization was doomed.

“He didn’t know what others’ performance reviews had been. But he knew he couldn’t change, at least in the ways his boss suggested. He started updating his resume, making phone calls, and networking.

“A week after his performance review, something happened.

“His boss unexpectedly left the organization.

“And my friend was promoted.

“He still doesn’t understand it. Neither do I.

“Sounds like one of those crazy organizational things.

“Or a God thing.”

Top photograph by Arlington Research via Unsplash. Used with permission.

The Poetry of the Best Job You Ever Had

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It started with a phone call from a friend. “Did you see the job ad in the paper?” he said.

“What job ad?” I said.

“The city school district is looking for a communications director. You’d be perfect.”

“Do you hate me or something?” I said.

The city school district was indeed looking for a communications director. The district was in organizational chaos. A reform school board had brought in a management consultant firm from New York to reorganize the district. Schools had been closed. Central office staff had been laid off – some 800 people. Management of cafeterias, school buses, and other services was being outsourced. The management firm was doing what had to be done, but the district was so strangled by its own politics and so intertwined with city politics that it was impossible to try to make the changes from within. 

To give some scope to the problem: the district was staffed and resourced for 100,000 students. Officially, something slightly less than 40,000 attended. The real number was closer to 30,000. The day the management firm arrived, it was learned that the district was so in spending deficit that bankruptcy might be required.

And this was the organization I would be perfect for? Not to mention the ongoing issues, problems, and violence associated with virtually all urban school districts?

I ended up applying for the job. I ended up getting the job. It was the best job I’d ever had. It was also the worst. I was living the opening of A Tale of Two Cities.

It was performance poetry. It was improv poetry. It was epic and it was free verse. Everyone knew exactly how communications had to be run. 

I received daily phone calls from the mayor’s office, giving me instructions on what I was supposed to do each day. I ignored them, every single time. 

Poetry at Work

I learned about police radios and how the news media used them to track district news, like when a school board member threw a pitcher of water on a district official because she had seen The Wizard of Oz and knew that water melted witches. 

School board members leaked each other’s emails. 

My budget – which the previous year had been $1 million with a staff of 12 – had been cut to $20,000 and a staff of 1/2, and the budget had already been spent before I arrived. I had to invent communications out of whole cloth, with no money. 

There was never a work day without multiple crises. The work followed me home at night and on weekends – I once did a television interview on a Saturday outside the car dealership where my car was being serviced. I did another one in my family room. I did interviews at schools, meetings, on sidewalks, at lunches, in hallways. I was on television so much that a crazy anomaly developed: an aging, white male Baby Boomer became the public face of an urban school district. 

I was there almost nine months, the most tumultuous nine months of the district’s history, my career, and even my own life. I left because I could sense I was burning out; no one could handle communications in constant chaos. 

I did get to see and experience the best and worst of human behavior – and sometimes from the same people. I was personally tested for what I could handle, and I knew I had not been found wanting. I loved and hated that job, and I would never do it again. But I was thankful that I’d done it. 

From Poetry at Work:

First day on the job 

It’s only 9 a.m.
Channel 5 is waiting, cameras
filming in expectation
of a statement, any statement,
it doesn’t matter what it says;
school board members 
are leaking emails on each other,
the teacher on the phone 
is correcting my pronunciation;
the newspaper uses police radios
to follow the school district news
while the consultant is calling
about “a better brand for the schools”;
the parents protest is scheduled
for 5:30; the mayor’s office
is sending PR instructions
and I’m told the teachers have 
a sick-out today because they
can’t bank sick days anymore
and it’s only 9 a.m. and 
my first day on the job. I’m
going to love this place.

Top photograph by Mesh via Unsplash. Used with permission.

The Poetry of the Organization Chart

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I was sitting with a woman in the Human Resources Department. There had been a reorganization of our department, part of a general reshuffling across the company, and I’d been assigned to sit with her to work out the new organization chart. 

You would think this was something of a useless exercise. Shouldn’t it be a simple matter of “here’s the boss, here are his or her direct reports, and here’s who reports to them.” But it was anything but simple, and I was to get a lesson in the Byzantine art form of corporate organization charts.

First, she pointed out, not all of the boss direct reports had the same title. Some were directors; some were managers. Next, there were directors and there were directors – a title wasn’t necessarily indicative of grade level, and grade level was everything. The chart had to indicate that by a subtle positioning of the boxes, with some slightly more elevated than the others. The same thing applied to the managers. Then there was the problem of some managers have more people reporting to them than directors did. 

And then for the mass of people in the department, those with no one reporting to them (aka the people who did the work), the grade levels were all over the place. That had to be accounted for, without making the chart itself look like a mess.

Poetry at Work

Organization chart-making was an art form. It was like highly formalized poetry, simultaneously including massive complexity displayed as simplicity. Because we had more than 80,000 people in the company, the Human Resources Department had a team of people devoted to the care and maintenance of organization charts. That’s all they did. And reorganizations were their worst nightmare.

A decade of reorganization after reorganization, along with asset sales and layoffs, led to the only possible response. Organization chart-making was decentralized to various business and administrative units; centralization of the charts disappeared. We had moved from high formalized poetry where everything had to rhyme within the correct meter to the universe of absolute free verse. Everything became a jumble. Without the inviable hand of that old HR team managing the charts, what few charts were produced effectively misinformed everyone.

As cumbersome and time-consuming as they were to create and maintain, the old organization charts did manage to account for management exceptions, problems, and quirks. Yes, management should have figured out how to handle personnel problems, but we’re talking about human beings here, with their frailties, willfulness, and pride (some managers never, never made mistakes, and they were ready to tell you that). 

The traditional organization chart didn’t so much accommodate that reality as figure out a way to record it. And the new world of no organization charts couldn’t last for long; people crave order and stability. This became worse when organizations embraced the matrix structure, which is stubbornly resistant of explanation by chart.

Like a poem, an organization chart is a human-constructed artifact. Change a word, or change a box, and the entire meaning can change, and often does. But also like poems, organizational charts have influences, histories, and embedded complexities. Not to mention ambiguities.

From Poetry at Work: “It makes a kind of sense, this organizational free verse, but many of us remember and still long for the time when we knew where responsibility and accountability lay – expressed by the formal poetry of the organization chart.”

Top photograph by Alex Kotliarskyi via Unsplash. Used with permission.

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