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.
"Hello?"
"Hey, Sarah?" There was noise in the background. It sounded as if she was somewhere crowded, but there was also an engine rumbling and traffic.
"Anjali? What's up? Are you okay?"
"I'm okay." I knew the cadences of her speech well enough to tell she wasn't. "Sarah, can I borrow some money? I promise I'll pay it back as soon as I can. I've got some saved up, I just can't access it in a hurry."
"Sure. What do you need?"
What she needed was a ticket back to Melbourne as soon as possible. She was already in a bus on her way to Mumbai Airport, with her phone battery on twenty percent, and for reasons that she wouldn't discuss in front of strangers she couldn't or wouldn't use the return ticket her parents had bought. I figured she'd tell me when she was ready.
Neither of us was sure how long it would take a money transfer to clear, so in the end we agreed that I'd buy the ticket for her and send through the details and the bill. By the time I'd done that it was three in the morning. I went back to bed, but I was wide awake, my mind whirring through every conceivable scenario that might explain the evening's drama. I wanted to help, and I didn't know how.
In the end I decided that if I couldn't fix the situation, I could at least do something nice for Anjali. If I had my time zones right, she'd be arriving at the airport in the evening, with her flight not due until mid-morning the next day. Remembering my Dutch trip, I thought—why not upgrade her ticket, so she could at least stay in the business lounge and have a little bit of space and quiet on the flight?
Perhaps it was a silly plan. It was a lot of money for a few hours' comfort—I could've booked a week in a decent hotel for the cost of an upgrade to business—and I would have balked at spending that much on myself. But I needed to do something, and this was something, and I couldn't think of anything else so I did it. Then, having impulsively spent a couple of thousand dollars in the small hours of the morning, I went back to bed and finally managed to fall asleep.
I woke to two messages from her. The first:
You shouldn't have.
The second, sent several hours later:
But thank you. Business lounge is nice. Got to switch off now, ttyl.
She was due to get in early Tuesday morning, and after some consideration I texted her back:
Want me to meet you at the airport?
My protective mode had been triggered, and after several weeks of almost no contact I was suddenly feeling her absence.
There was no reply. I wasn't sure if she'd received my message. Unsure whether to take her silence as yes or no, I waited until four p.m. before making my apologies at work and arranging to take the Tuesday off. I got up early and caught the Skybus to International, and waited at the exit point from Customs.
Several flights had landed more or less together, and the queue was badly backed up. I waited for almost an hour before at last the Mumbai passengers started to trickle through. Mercifully, Anjali was among the first of them. She had her head down, and from her shock when I hailed her I realised she hadn't seen my message.
"Sarah?" She didn't seem pleased or displeased to see me, just confused.
