8 Doubt

The August sun was blazing overhead as I made my way back to the path that paralleled Kate’s Creek. Although I had grown up in St. Louis and had lived for years on the East Coast, I had spent enough time in milder climates to become permanently uncomfortable with the humidity that accompanied Connecticut’s summer heat. I was grateful to slip beneath the trees as I turned in the direction of Building 8.

For the exposure I was feeling on the inside, however, there was no cover. I was on completely unfamiliar ground. Nothing I had experienced in my career had prepared me for my meeting with Bud. But although I was feeling quite unsure of myself and was far less convinced that I was on the top of the Zagrum advancement heap than I had been just a few hours before, I also had never felt better about what I was doing. I knew there was something I had to do during this break—I just hoped that Joyce Mulman was around to allow me to do it.

“Sheryl, could you tell me where Joyce Mulman’s desk is?” I asked my secretary as I walked past her and into my office. As I turned from putting my notebook on the table, I noticed that Sheryl was standing at my door, a worried look on her face.

“What’s wrong?” she asked slowly. “Has Joyce done something again?”

Sheryl’s words implied concern for me, but her manner betrayed her concern for Joyce, as if she wanted to warn Joyce of an impending storm if she had the chance. And I was surprised by the assumption, implicit in her question, that if I wanted to see someone, it must be because that person had done something wrong. My meeting with Joyce could wait for a minute. I needed to meet with Sheryl.

“No, nothing’s wrong,” I said. “Come in for a minute, though—there’s something I want to talk to you about.” Seeing her uncertainty, I said, “Please, take a seat.” I walked around the desk and sat across from her.

“I’m new here,” I began, “and you haven’t had a lot of experience with me yet, but I want to ask you a question— and I need you to be absolutely candid with me.”

“Okay,” she said noncommittally.

“Do you like working with me? I mean, compared with others you’ve worked for, would you say I’m a good boss?”

Sheryl squirmed in her seat, obviously uncomfortable with the question. “Sure,” she offered in an overly eager voice. “Of course I like working for you. Why?”

“I’m just wondering,” I said. “So you like working for me?”

She nodded unconvincingly.

“But would you say you like working with me as much as others you’ve worked for?”

“Oh, sure,” she said with a forced smile, looking down at my desk. “I’ve liked everyone I’ve worked for.”

My question had put Sheryl in an impossible situation. It was supremely unfair. But I had my answer: She didn’t like me much. The truth showed in her forced nonchalance and fidgeting discomfort. But I felt no ill will toward her. For the first time in a month, I felt sorry. I also felt a little embarrassed.

“Well, thank you, Sheryl,” I said. “But I’m starting to feel that I’ve probably been kind of lousy to work with.”

She didn’t say anything.

I looked up and thought I noticed water forming in her eyes. Four weeks with her and I’d driven her to tears! I felt like the biggest heel. “I’m really sorry, Sheryl. Really sorry. I think I have some things to unlearn. I think I’ve been blind to some of the things I do to people. I don’t know a lot about it yet, but I’m beginning to think about how I might sort of minimize others and fail to see them as people. You know what I’m talking about?”

To my surprise, she nodded knowingly.

“You do?”

“Sure. The box, self-deception, and all of that? Yes. Everyone here knows about it.”

“Did Bud talk to you too?”

“No, not Bud. He meets personally with all the new senior managers. There’s a class here that everyone goes through where we learn the same things.”

“So you know about the box—seeing others as people or seeing them as objects?”

“Yes, and self-betrayal, collusion, getting out of the box, focusing on results, the four levels of organizational performance, and all the rest.”

“I don’t think I’ve learned any of those things yet. At least Bud hasn’t mentioned them. What was that—self … ?”

“Betrayal,” Sheryl said, filling in the gap. “It’s how we get in the box in the first place. But I don’t want to spoil what’s coming. It sounds like you’ve only just started.”

Now I really felt like a heel. It was one thing to treat another person as an object if she was as clueless to all these ideas as I had been, but knowing about the box, Sheryl had probably been seeing right through me the whole time.

“Boy, I’ve probably seemed like the biggest jerk to you, haven’t I?”

“Not the biggest,” she said with a smile.

Her wisecrack eased my mood, and I laughed. It was probably the first laugh between us in the four weeks we’d worked together, and in the ease of the moment, that seemed like a real shame. “Well, maybe by this afternoon I’ll know what to do about it.”

“Maybe you know more about it than you think you do,” she said. “By the way, Joyce is on the second floor, next to the pillar marked ‘8-31.’ ”

When I passed by Joyce’s cubicle, it was empty. She’s probably at lunch, I thought. I was about to leave but then thought better of it: If I don’t do this now, who knows if I’ll ever do it? I sat down on an extra chair in the cubicle and waited.

The cubicle was plastered with pictures of two little girls about three and five years old. And there were crayon drawings of happy faces, sunrises, and rainbows. I might have been sitting in a day-care center except for the piles of charts and reports stacked all around the floor.

I wasn’t sure what Joyce did in the organization— my organization—which seemed pretty pathetic to me at the moment, but from the look of all the stacks of reports, I gathered that she was a member of one of our product-quality teams. I was looking at one of the reports when she rounded the corner and saw me.

“Oh, Mr. Callum,” she said in utter shock, stopping in her tracks, her hands to her face. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry for the mess. It’s not usually like this, really.” She’d clearly been knocked off balance. I was the last person she probably ever expected to see in her cubicle.

“Don’t worry about it. It’s nothing compared to my office anyway. And please, call me Tom.”

I could see the confusion in her face. She apparently had no idea what to say, or do, next. She just stood there at the entrance of her cubicle, trembling.

“I, uh, came to apologize, Joyce, for how I blew up at you about the conference room and all. That was really unprofessional of me. I’m sorry.”

“Oh, Mr. Callum, I … I deserved it, I really did. I should never have erased your things. I’ve felt so bad about it. I’ve hardly slept in a week.”

“Well, I think there probably was a way I could’ve handled it that wouldn’t have left you sleepless.”

Joyce broke out in an “Oh-you-didn’t-have-to-do-that” smile and looked at the floor, pawing it with her toe. She’d stopped trembling.

It was 12:30. I had 20 or so minutes before I needed to make my way back over to continue with Bud. I was feeling pretty good and decided to call Laura.

“Laura Callum,” said the voice on the other end.

“Hi,” I said.

“Tom, I only have a second. What do you need?”

“Nothing. I just wanted to say hi.”

“Is everything okay?” she said.

“Yeah, fine.”

“You’re sure.”

“Yes. Can’t I just call you to say hi without being interrogated?”

“Well, it’s not like you ever call. There must be something going on.”

“No, there’s not. Nothing. Really.”

“Okay, if you say so.”

“Jeez, Laura. Why do you make everything so hard? I was just calling to see how you are.”

“Well, I’m fine. And thanks for your concern, as always,” she said, her voice dripping with sarcasm.

Everything that Bud had said that morning suddenly seemed far too naïve and simplistic. The box, self-deception, people or objects—all of those ideas might apply in some situations but not this one. Or if they did, who cared?

“Great. That’s just great. Hope you have a nice afternoon,” I said, matching her sarcastic tone and then some. “And I hope you’re as cheerful and understanding with everyone there as you are with me.”

The phone clicked dead.

No wonder I’m in the box, I thought as I hung up the phone. Who wouldn’t be, married to someone like that?

I walked back to the Central Building full of questions. First of all, what if someone else is in the box? What then? Like with Laura, it doesn’t matter what I do. I called just to talk with her. And I was out of the box, too. But then, with one swift emotionless stroke, she cut me off at the knees—just like she always does. She’s the one with the problem. It doesn’t matter what I do. Even if I am in the box, so what? What could you expect?

Okay, I had a couple of good experiences with Sheryl and Joyce. But what else are they going to do? I mean, I run the division. They have to fall in line. And so what if Sheryl started to cry? Why should that be my fault? She has to be tougher than that. Anyone that weak deserves to cry—or at the very least, I shouldn’t feel guilty if she does.

My anger grew with each step. This is a waste of time, I thought. It’s all so Pollyannaish. In a perfect world, okay. But blast it, this is business!

Just then, I heard someone call my name. I turned toward the voice. To my surprise, it was Kate Stenarude, cutting across the lawn toward me.