Dancing Priest

Author and Novelist Glynn Young

work

The Poet Blogs the Layoff

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Layoffs were coming. The big announcement from the CEO was circulated by email. It was a masterpiece of vagueness. It didn’t say how many people would be affected. It didn’t say when the affected people would know. It did say there would be a severance program, although it included no details. 

In short, the important things people wanted to know weren’t communicated. I’m sure management congratulated itself on communicating, but the rumors had already been circulating and people were already far beyond “layoffs are coming.” What people also knew was that the people being laid off might be the fortunate ones. Those who remained would likely be reorganized, with more work and fewer people to get it done.

Having been through this before at another company, I had a better idea of what would happen and what people really cared about that colleagues who hadn’t been through it, especially younger colleagues. A small group came to me and asked if I would consider blogging about my past experience on the company’s intranet. I said I’d think about it.

My first thought was a selfish one: would I be drawing a target on my back? My answer was, maybe. I’d certainly be drawing attention, but that could also work another way: “He helped people understand the layoff, so they got rid of him.” That wouldn’t bode well for trust in the company’s management. I talked to a few people, including my boss. The poet in me won out, and I decided to do it. 

I drafted three posts: what happened to me when I had been laid off; what kinds of questions did I get from colleagues, friends, and family; and what happened once when a close friend and colleague was laid off and I wasn’t. 

Poetry at Work

This was a big deal inside the company. It had never been done before, and HR was nervous. The lawyers wanted to approve every word, and I refused on the grounds that it had nothing to do with what was happening and going to happen, but instead talked about what happened to one person (me) at another company. 

The first post was published. The first day, more than 10 percent of the employee population read it. It had set a record for the company’s internal blog. The next two drew even bigger numbers. In the communications void before the actual storm, I told people what they could expect, what they should know, and how they should treat fellow employees who would be laid off.

I had people I’d never met come to my office to thank me. I had countless phone calls and email. A switchboard operator called to determine where to direct a news media inquiry, and she thanked me for my posts. I heard that many people printed them and brought them home to their families. (The company invariable forgets about the family, who will be as much affected by a layoff as the employee.) And the company received kudos for allowing the posts to be published.

The posts weren’t easy to write. My own experiences were still painful; you don’t forget these kinds of situations. But you do what a poet does – and take an event or experience and turn it into something universal, something that help people see the experience in a different if personal light. 

I still consider those three posts to be among some of the very best work I ever did.

From Poetry at Work: “A close friend at work learned he was losing his job. We met in the corporate cafeteria the next day. He walked over to me, lunch tray in his hands, and stood there. ‘Are you sure you want to be seen with me?’ he asked. I thought he was joking. He wasn’t. His entire department had stopped speaking to him. He had to stay in the office for the next 45 days while being shunned. I was stunned. So, I did the only thing I knew to do. I stood and hugged him. He cried. What a scene that made, right there in the cafeteria.”

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

Top photograph by Matt Noble 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.

The Poetry of the Interview

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It was the strangest interview I’ve ever participated in – on either side of the table.

A friend had talked me, or conned me, into interviewing for a job with St. Louis Public Schools – the director of communications. 

The school district was in chaos – an outside management firm had been brought in to run the district, schools were being consolidated and closed, services were being outsourced, central office layoffs had emptied more than half of the headquarters building, and protests by parents, students, employees, former employees, teachers and the teachers’ union were daily. School board factions were fighting each other through the news media. The news media was already showing up early each morning at the district’s administration building – knowing there would always be a new crisis to report.

And I wanted to insert myself into that?

I don’t remember all of the arguments my friend used, but they must have been convincing. I sent in my application, thinking that would be the end of it. But then I was called to come in for an interview.

Poetry at Work

On the appointed day, I showed up and was escorted to a conference room at the headquarters building. Eventually, 10 of us filled the room. Every 10 to 15 minutes, one of us was called out for the interview. I was the last to be called.

I was escorted to the district’s board room. Inside, three people were seated – the interim superintendent, who was a principal with the outside consulting firm; one of his consultants; and a district officer who would be the official boss of the communications director.

I was seated at the head of the table. The questions started, and I was immediately relieved to see they were using the behavioral interview method, in which you’re asked questions like “What was your greatest failure?” I was familiar with that kind of interview; it was (and still is) broadly used by corporate America.

The superintendent was seated to my immediate left, and I could see he was increasingly impatient. He was moving around in his chair, drumming his fingers on the table, and looked ready to erupt at any moment. And then he actually did erupt.

Throwing the interview question sheets in the air, he yelled. “Why the heck do you want this job?” Except he didn’t say heck.

That was not on the list of approved behavioral questions. The other two people at the table both closed their eyes, as if they knew this would happen.

“It’s not a case of why I want this job,” I said. “It’s more a case of why you need me in this job.”

And then we talked. He calmed down, and the others gradually joined the conversation. 

When we finished, the superintendent nodded and said I’d hear something within two to three days.

That was bizarre, I thought, as I drove home. I wonder which of the 10 of us will get sucked into that?

As I pulled into my driveway in suburban St. Louis, my wife was waiting. In the driveway.

“You have to go back downtown,” she said. The school district had called, and I was to meet with one of the board members. I drove back, and learned I was to be at a restaurant at 4:30 to meet with a group of teachers for a listening session. And let them meet the district’s new director of communications.

It was poetry at work, all right – the poetry of the totally unexpected. You think you’re reading an ambiguous poem liked “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” and discover it’s turned into Alan Ginsburg’s “Howl.” The interview process had a form and even a kind of rhythm and meter about it. Until it didn’t. 

What started as formalist poetry had erupted into performance art.

The Job Interview

Tell me a poem, a story
of a favored poet or poem,
one who changed your life,
your mind, opened up
possibilities. Or made you
feel secure as your anchors,
your moorings, were removed.
Speak to me of your need;
describe the expectations
(are they great ones?), explain
how we soar together, toward
the sun, if not the moon,
tell me how I become
part of your larger self.

From Poetry at Work: “Interviews, like poetry, are ultimately about ideas, even though they are ostensibly about people. Behind the people in an interview are ideas about careers, employment, the future, and organizational goals and objectives. Behind a poem is experience, personal and group history, philosophy, how one understands the world, and even hope for a different or changed future.”

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

Top photograph by Marten Bjork via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Poetry at Work, Chapter 20: The Poetry of Retirement

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Poetry at Work Poetry of the Workspace

I might have retired twice from the same company.

I officially retired in 2015, and I’d had given a year’s notice. I could have continued working, but the fact was that my skills, experience, and abilities were being wasted. I could have continued for a few more years, perhaps hoping for another general downsizing and a severance package, but work had become almost painful. 

When I told the head of the department of my plan to retire, the response was surprising. He became angry. It wasn’t as if I was irreplaceable. Without really knowing, I suspect it was more a case of I was doing it on my timetable, and it wasn’t something the department was planning on its timetable.

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

Poetry at Work, Chapter 19: The Poetry of Workplace Restoration

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Poetry at Work Poetry of the Workspace

For a long time, I had what several of colleagues called the most interesting office at work. Because I was a speechwriter, I was expected to (a) read everything the CEO did, (b) read a lot of business books, particularly popular ones, (c) study books about speechwriting, and (d) read books on current issues. All of which meant I was doing a lot of reading. And the CEO likcd to read the novels of John Updike, just about anything by Charles Dickens, and anything published on the subject of Winston Churchill.

For a reader like me, this was a great job. 

One end of my office was floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. Another wall had a smaller but still sizeable bookshelf. I also had a row of books on a credenza. It’s no surprise that my office was known as the building library. 

My “frequently consulted” books included poetry. That was by design. I had several old American poetry anthologies, and my Norton’s Anthology of English Literature (college textbooks) included considerable poetry by British writers. 

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

Poetry at Work, Chapter 18: The Poetry of Electronic Work

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Poetry at Work Poetry of the Workspace

Think back 25 years (if you’re old enough). It sounds almost quaint today, but email was just beginning to come into its own. At the company where I was working, with more than 40,000 people, some 5,000 had been brought into the email system. Eventually, all would be, but 5,000 was enough to give us critical mass for a new communications venture – an email newsletter for employees. 

To show how new this was, only one other company in the United States had an employee email newsletter. I hoped we would be the second.

I had meetings with the people in charge of the email system – not only were there various departments, there was also an email council overseeing email operations. My proposal was a text-only newsletter to be sent to the 5,000 people on email.

The response was something akin to asking people to sit in a room full of rats infected with bubonic plague. I didn’t know what I was asking. There were too many hardware platforms. I didn’t understand the technical aspects of the work. The system could crash. The company was too diverse for people to care about what was happening in other divisions. To be fair, these objections came not only from IT people but also from my own communications colleagues.

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