Long ago in a state far away I worked in a nonprofit for an executive director, Sam, whom we will also call the Mad King. He had humor and energy and that prized quality among bosses of being not at all a nitpicker or micromanager. (I can picture half my readers saying at this point: now, where can I find my own Sam?)
Another defining characteristic of Sam was his brains, some said his brilliance. And this was what made me love working for Sam: he delighted in my smartness as I reveled in his. I was passionate about our mission, and it was heady to have a boss that I could riff with in our one-on-one meetings, strategizing to experiment this way with this project, and to seek this type of funding for another, and hey, the latest findings here on human behavior is something we can weave into the proposal we’re co-writing. I rose to my smartest, professional self whenever I was in Sam’s presence. He was unthreatened by my presenting mental challenges to him. Sam got me, and I got him, in a plainly platonic way that never got muddied by sexual tension.
The problem was that Sam was rarely around. He cancelled as many of his scheduled meetings with me as he kept, and my projects suffered for lack of information only he had and decisions only he could make. Sam and I once decided to develop a key relationship in another town with Solomon, an expert in our field. But after Sam cancelled three appointments with him in a row, Solomon dropped the idea of partnering with us. Sam seemed oblivious that a major opportunity had gone down the drain. And as Sam the Mad King broke promises to me, I unwillingly became a promise-breaker to the committees I facilitated. Plans could not move forward without him.
Why was Sam never around? The reasons were as diverse as faces at a United Nations meeting: vacations (sometimes a week per month for months in a row), conferences, dramatic illnesses that sprang out of nowhere, family members needing to be driven places, great chunky blocks mysteriously marked “hold” on his Outlook calendar. Ann the office manager shrugged, “This is the way Sam has always been and the way he’ll always be.” People tried to expect little of him. Ann and Sam were tightly defensive of his need to work at will, to come and go as he pleased without accounting to anyone else. Sam also refused to work past 4:30 or on weekends no matter how far behind he got.
I know what you are wondering: didn’t Sam suffer any consequences for dropping so many balls so frequently? Not really, largely because the nonprofit Sam and I worked for filled a niche that no other organization filled in that faraway state. This meant that the clients we served and the providers with whom we contracted had no choices other than us. If we broke our commitments or fell down on meeting their needs, well, we were still the only game in town.
I experienced Sam as the Mad King, putting me through the depths of despair and the heights of professional elation, my projects going in fits and starts as he capriciously popped in and I captured his attention, and then did not see him for days. The whole office danced around his attendance whims. I had cerebral arrest when he withheld his presence, and glorious flights of shared ideas when he returned.
One contributor to this somewhat unusual experience of a job was my own passionate nature. I wanted so much for my projects to succeed that I experienced Sam — central to that success — in a more intense way than a laid-back, easygoing person would have experienced him.
The other half of the Mad King drama, though, was Sam’s plain old poor behavior and lack of negative consequences for it. Negative consequences almost always reshape behavior to some degree. In a future post I’ll write about some ways I tried dealing with the Mad King, with varying degrees of success.
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he sounds like a challenging boss. My current boss has the positives that you say Sam had but is also very reliable …..