Inside Work Becomes Outside Work

Tick…tick…tick…tick…tick.

I was never a clock watcher, but that afternoon I couldn’t keep my eyes off of the plastic Elvis wall clock, his hips and legs swinging back and forth as the clock’s hands moved sluggishly around his guitar and mildly smirking face. I was a rabid Elvis fan, and one of the ladies at work saw the clock in Vegas and grabbed it for me. It was a perfect clock for me in every possible way, the one concession to frivolity in my otherwise quintessentially drab office.

But today Elvis’s gyrating hips just would not move fast enough.

I’d been preparing assiduously for weeks for this afternoon. Every task had been chosen thoughtfully and pointed at leaving my desk as clear as possible by this day. My family was headed for Grand Cayman Island the next morning for two weeks, a vacation that otherwise was way beyond our means but for the substantial cache of frequent flyer miles my wife had amassed from routine business trips to Asia.

With the airline tickets and hotels drastically discounted and essentially free, we were taking a two-week vacation together for the first time ever. I’d been working for the company for about eight years and wasn’t too good about taking time off or the self-care strategies necessary to stay sharp in an ever expanding set of job duties and responsibilities. Too many long weeks running on caffeine and too little sleep had me pretty wasted, so this vacation meant a lot and I was anxious about getting away free and clear that afternoon.

Elvis’ hips had just got me past 4:00, and the thought briefly crossed my mind I should just leave early. We had a stupidly early flight the next morning, and I’d given no thought to packing and wasn’t even sure if I had suitable clothes for two weeks in a tropical paradise. My wife was much more organized, and as much as she tried to get my attention on things like this, I was resistant to the coaching I obviously needed in life nuances like proper wardrobe and getting ready to travel in advance. She is a master at this. Me, not so much.

But leaving work early was not my style at all. I was fond of thinking and occasionally saying, “I’m not the smartest person here, but I guarantee no one will out-work me.” So, trying to be first one in the office and last one out was always part of my game plan, and I was a bit of a time management freak and used those extra hours on the job to deliver as much quality output as was in me. Not wasting time was a bit of an obsession, so I dismissed the idea of leaving early that afternoon just about the moment he showed up, lurking furtively in my doorway.

At the outset let me say I got along with pretty much everyone at work but not so well with Stan. I had a background that went way back in Purchasing and thought I knew more than a little bit about it, but Stan was the Purchasing Manager and even though he reported to me, he was a contrarian to begin with and consistently resisted any insights I offered that might help him in his position.

So we weren’t exactly pals, but were able to peacefully coexist despite what struck me as his pretty obvious distain for any authority I thought I might have as his supervising manager. I comforted myself by acknowledging his generally ubiquitous distain for most of the people above him in the organization. It was pretty clear Stan felt himself to be a superior intellect.

But there he was, in my doorway at a little after 4:00 on Friday afternoon, now with a forced smile and an inch stack of paper in an orange plastic folio. He held it to showcase the bright red URGENT stamp on a transmittal memo covering the folder.

I sat there at my pristine, clear, unencumbered desk and immediately my heart rate began to elevate, before he had said a word. I knew exactly what was coming. I’d seen this movie with Stan more than once, and I’d been woefully deficient in breaking him of the nasty habit of the sneak attack, surprise, must have it now, four-alarm fire.

Of course, I was right. He explained with a high degree of self-importance that this was a contract for work to be done in the production plant, the contractor had to start Tuesday, the terms and conditions of the contract were not what we wanted but the best deal anyone could get, I needed to review and comment immediately and then the contract must go to the CEO for review and signature, which needed to get done latest by Monday close of business.

Well, I freaking freaked. I can’t remember all the vicious things I said to Stan, but they were bad and I used crude language, which I never did. All the weeks of preparation and painstaking effort to get myself ready to hit the door on time this day welled up inside me, and I verbally ripped this man’s head off, not in small measure I think because I felt like he disrespected me to begin with. My mind was spinning too about all the other inconsiderate idiots that must have contributed to this cluster, and I felt my getting off to Grand Cayman with a clear head slipping into oblivion.

Stan just stared blankly at me while I berated him, and when I stopped to take a breath and gather more steam, he placed the dreaded orange file on my desk, turned on his heal and scurried away as would a rodent fleeing its voracious predator.

I sat there fuming, opened the file and literally could not focus enough to read it for maybe fifteen minutes. My mind was spinning, and each and every complaint I had ever had with anyone and everyone I worked with started to cascade and swirl around me in a way that made doing the work at hand impossible.

Elvis’ hips passed 4:30 and I was no closer to understanding the heap of paper on my desk than I was when I had briefly thought about leaving early. I knew I had to get myself under control and finally turned to the one proven method I instinctively clung to when my emotions started running wildly out of control.

I’d taken Lamaze classes with my wife when she was pregnant with our daughter and knew the breathing exercises could help. I shut my door, closed my eyes and got to work getting my head back in the game.

It took a while. At about 4:45 I opened the file again, and it looked totally different to me. It was well organized, mostly boilerplate that I had seen before and the negotiated contract provisions were clearly set forth in a precisely articulated cover memo. The imposing pile was a lot less arduous to get through than my reptilian brain had initially calculated, I had but a few comments that weren’t of substance and I felt pretty good about sending this up to the CEO’s office.

I anxiously walked it up there. It was now 5:40, and she fortunately was still there, as was her administrative assistant. I asked if I could pop in, got clearance and I first apologized for the intrusion late on a Friday. She was gracious and we chatted for a few minutes. She read the cover memo and my comments closely, leafed through the contract and signed it on the spot. I was relieved and a little surprised, but I shouldn’t have been. She trusted me, and if I said it was good to sign, she went with that.

I triumphantly took the contract down to Purchasing, but now it was 6:05 and they were long gone, as was typical. So I went back to my office, stuck the folder in a large manila envelope, took a thick Sharpie and penned a big smile face on the outside and went back and shoved it through the large mail port in their door.

Out the door at 6:15 was still a victory of sorts, a little earlier than I typically left, but I was deeply perplexed and embarrassed by the toxic interaction I had had with Stan. It was unprofessional and not like me, but it was me and I had said things that still hung in the air and scared me that I had said them. It also struck me that when you are thinking that everyone that you work with is a jerk, it’s highly likely that you are the one being the jerk.

All night as I packed I obsessed about what an ass I had been. It was pretty clear to me I needed to apologize to Stan, and I wanted to do so before we left for Grand Cayman. This was something I could probably ruminate on for the whole two weeks, so I wanted to clear the air quickly and get it off my mind.

Purchasing was easy to get a hold of, even on a Saturday morning. They had to be available, because we were a production facility that ran 24/7/365 and they could get called on at any time of day or night. Despite the early hour, I called Stan from a payphone (remember those?) at the airport the next morning to apologize.

He picked up right away, and I jumped into a heartfelt and effusive apology for the way I had acted. I put a positive spin on it and let him know I was successful in getting the contract signed and it was waiting for him at his office.

He was completely silent while I went on and on. When I was finished, there was an uncomfortable pause, he cleared his throat and spoke softly and deliberately.

“You were terribly out of line. I expect better than that from you.”

I waited, but that was it. A chill went up my spine. He wasn’t about to let me off the hook, was he? I could feel my heart start to race again, and the reptilian brain started clicking into attack mode, but fortunately I chose to take a long, deep breath and simply said, “You’re right. I’ve got some work to do. It won’t happen again.” End of conversation.

So I didn’t go to Grand Cayman with a clear head; I went to Grand Cayman understanding that I had some things to think about. To think about work, the people at work and how I related to them. I also thought a lot about me, my priorities and what was I going to do to learn from my weird behavior. Rather than explaining it away as an anomaly, I took it as a signal; an opportunity to get better, but only if I worked at it.

I came back after two weeks of thinking, relaxing and enjoying the time in a beautiful place with my family, and as with a lot of things I experience I sat down and drafted an action plan to respond. Part of my disappointment with my outburst with Stan was that I did know better.

I had studied these things in business management classes and especially the idea of emotional intelligence, and it struck me that now was the time to assure that I was actually walking the talk of what I had learned. This was a chance to improve, if I chose to see it that way.

Soon after I got back to work, I went with some buddies to get lunch at a Chinese restaurant. We got fortune cookies with the check. Mine read, “To be calm is the highest achievement of the self.”

I took it as a sign and taped that little reminder to my computer monitor and established a ritual of reciting that mantra repeatedly throughout the day to myself and breathing deeply, especially when the stress impulse hit me to fight, flee or freeze. I was trained that another option when threatened or stressed that we can choose is to flow, but that means we have to intellectually interrupt the primordial stress response. I learned that a breathing “time out” is a good method to do exactly that.

So the action plan I fashioned included more serious and in-depth study of business subjects addressed by scholars and experts. I read voraciously and typically knocked off 10–12 business books a year for probably 30 years, so I really dug into topics like emotional intelligence, work-life balance, self-care, stress management, interpersonal communication, leadership, organizational development, Corporate Social Responsibility, employee centric corporate culture, sustainability and environmental performance and “Safety First” management principles.

I also came to understand and practice the philosophy of taking care of my emotional, physical and spiritual health first, so I could do my best for my employer, the people I worked with and my family.

It turns out that as prickly as Stan could be, he was one of my best teachers. He didn’t let me off the hook. He was straight with me and he held me accountable. As chagrined as I was by losing control in the heat of that moment, I also know that none of us is defined by our worst moment, particularly in a high pressure work situation, and the best we can do is admit it when we are wrong or out of control and learn from our mistakes.

Continuous improvement in a systematic way then became a primary operating mode for me, and I think over time I got progressively better at self-monitoring and choosing a calmer, healthier response in times of significant stress, conflict or even crisis. That reptilian brain is a real gift when a threat is immediate and existential, but most of us do not work in environments where that is routinely the case.

And one of the things that I know many of us learned in our COVID experiences is that paying close attention to and taking good care of our emotional, physical and spiritual health is Job #1. Greg McKeown gets it absolutely right in his book “Essentialism” when he reminds us to “Protect the Asset.”

Why? Because the asset is you. And there’s nothing selfish about that. You can’t and won’t do your best for others when you are overworked, sleep-deprived, stressed to the max and wired up to the point of making yourself physically ill.

Choosing a healthier path takes desire, determination, dedication, discipline and devotion, especially if you are trying to control or change patterns built up over a lifetime. It takes study; it takes practice; it involves progress and setbacks and it requires resiliency and persistence. But working on yourself first is critical to delivering high value in whatever it is you do you call work, and in whatever you want to achieve with your relationships with family and friends.

The quality of that inside work helps to define the quality of your outside work, and that can be a thing of beauty indeed.