Chapter 9: Wood For Sheep
January is my favourite time to work. It's so quiet while everybody else is off on holiday, and I can get stuff done without constant distraction. It was especially welcome the year we joined Preussler-Kennedy, giving me the chance to settle into the new office without having to deal with all the new people at the same time.
Change, as I may have said, is bad. Our acquisition by P-K meant I had to get used to a new commute, find five new places to buy lunch, and get to grips with all the small and not-so-small differences between the old work and the new. OwKeMa had been pretty informal about administrative stuff, as small businesses often are. P-K had an official system for everything from stationery orders to getting a flickering light fixed. That wasn't so bad—I like systems—but there was a lot to learn.
The toughest part was getting my head around my new responsibilities. During the Christmas party Lincoln had talked to me about reorganising the Technical Specialties teams to align the work we were bringing in with P-K's existing projects. By that stage in the evening I was in autistic overload, unable to take in more than half of what he was saying, but I didn't want to show weakness and I've never been great at saying no. So I'd nodded and agreed to everything he said. Some people wake after Christmas parties with hangovers; me, I woke to find myself "Director - Logistics Projects".
This meant that as well as the scheduling and warehousing work that I'd brought over from OwKeMa, I was now responsible for something to do with freight tracking and supply chain management, topics I knew next to nothing about. In the space of three months, I'd gone from being responsible only for myself, to running two different teams totalling eight people, something for which I was far from prepared.
I spent a large chunk of January buried in documentation about SKUs and inventory management software and a hundred other things, trying to get to grips with what my new team was doing and how it all worked. Every time I felt like I was starting to understand the tracking work, I found myself losing my grasp on the important details of the warehousing side of things, and every time I refreshed myself on the warehousing work I found the tracking stuff slipping through my fingers once more.
Normally I would have vented to Anjali about it all, but she was away on another family visit to Mumbai. We rarely managed to be online at the same time together—time zones didn't help—and every time I tried to write an email to her I ended up second-guessing myself, feeling silly for complaining about something that anybody else would've considered a success.
* * * * *
Lucy returned from holidays in early January, and promptly appointed herself my tour guide to the neighbourhood around our office. Every Tuesday and Thursday, when our schedules synced up, she'd drop by my desk. "Are you doing anything for lunch? Come on, I'll show you a little place..."
She knew a lot of little places. I followed her down cobbled laneways and up narrow staircases to one eatery after another, well-hidden places that I would never have found on my own in a month of exploration. Dumpling houses, Italian cafés, tapas joints, sushi parlours, you name it: most of them priced for students and all of them delicious enough for me to overlook the break in my routine.
Every time she'd ask me how I was settling in, and I'd tell her "not bad", and then we'd chat about inconsequential things. Until one day, as I was cautiously sticking a spoon into a bowl of dumplings swimming in an orange-red haze of chili oil, she asked a follow-up question.
"Sarah, if you'll excuse me asking, when you say 'not bad' what does that mean to you?"
"It, uh." I had to think for a moment. It was one of my scripts, the default answer to a how-are-you. Sometimes we get so used to the mask that we forget that it's possible to take it off. "To be honest, I feel a little bit out of my depth. There's just too much to keep track of and I'm doing my head in."
"The new team?"
"Uh-huh." I'd just eaten a dumpling and I could feel my lips tingling from the oil. "I'm taking on this project I haven't worked on before, and..."
In between mouthfuls of flavoursome incendiary, I monologued at her about my woes. She nodded along for most of it, just asking a question here and there, and when I stopped for a drink to soothe my mouth she leaned forward a little.
"Is this your first time managing people?"
"Pretty much, yeah."
"Smack me down if I'm out of line, but... Sarah, I've only known you a little while, but I hear you're scary smart. I get the impression you're really good with details, and you're a perfectionist. Am I wrong?"
I shrugged, shook my head slowly. I'm no good at accepting compliments, but all those things had been mentioned by my previous bosses more than once, and I took some pride in them.
"Can I give you some advice?"
"Okay?" I replied.
"I know you're a giant shiny brain and I love that, but it's also a kind of a trap. People like you, you're so good at the details and you get praised for it, so you get the message that it's always going to be your pathway to success. But that only goes so far. You're still human. If they give you more and more responsibility, eventually you
can't
be on top of all the details, and if you try to do that you'll just break yourself."
I coughed as a trickle of chili seared its way down my throat. "So... what then? How can I manage my team's work if I don't understand it?"
"You need to understand some of it, but not all of it. Understand the big picture, but beyond that... you have to learn to trust your team. Not
blind
trust, it doesn't mean you walk away from it and leave them without guidance, but you need to give up some of that control and let them do their bit. They might not do it the same way you do it, they might not be as perfectionist as you about it. All that matters is whether they can do it well enough. You're there to help them when they get stuck and help them get better at what they do, not to hover over their shoulders trying to do it all for them. My rule of thumb is, when you're feeling a little bit guilty and wondering if you're delegating too much work to your reports, that probably means you're delegating about the right amount."
I toyed with another dumpling, watching the oil swirl in the bowl. "That seems... I don't know if I'm good at that. It's hard to know how much I need to know."
"Of course it is. Nobody's born good at managing teams, it's a skill that needs to be learned. Give yourself permission to suck for a little while. Speaking of learning, you know we have training courses for this?"
"We do?"
"Oh yes. Let me fill you in..."
She talked me through the intricacies of the corporate training programs, and halfway through I asked her to stop for a moment so I could take notes. Then we strolled back to the office together. My head was buzzing, and I was far outside my comfort zone, but for the first time in weeks I didn't feel absolutely doomed.
* * * * *
Late in January, about a week before Anjali was due back, my phone woke me at one in the morning at the end of a weekend. It was an overseas call from a number I didn't recognise. I was about to drop the call when I blearily remembered that 91 was the country code for India.
