“Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated.”
THE BORG
Several months after losing his first director, Pasha hired a new one, Bo Asplund. Bo was a competent and morally upright Swede who kept a toothbrush in his breast pocket and liked to run a tight ship. He had made it clear from the outset that he would seek to apply “sound management principles” to the work of the office. Somehow, I had an inkling his lofty goal would meet with some resistance. To begin with, Pasha couldn’t get around the fact that someone might be called Bo. And so he called him Boo!, as if he were a ghost.
At the start of his employment, Boo! made every effort to get along with Cindy. For a time it worked reasonably well because Boo! had backbone and Cindy could sense that it would not be wise for her to confront him directly. Instead, she decided to grind him down gradually.
First, Cindy hired one of the most incompetent secretaries available in the entire UN system to work for Boo!: a woman from Haiti who appeared highly cultured and unusually slow to react to urgent demands. She had a knack for transforming a request for her to send a fax into a discussion of nineteenth-century Romantic poetry.
At first, Boo! did his best to appear interested in what his secretary had to say. This could not have been easy for him. Every detail of his body language exuded urgency. He would stand before her cubicle with arms crossed, tapping his foot, and nodding preemptively at every point she made, until such a time that he could cordially remind her that the piece of paper he carried in his hand required her attention.
Bo finally lost his temper with her, one day, after she disappeared for three hours in the middle of the afternoon. After Bo slammed his door shut, his secretary started mumbling to herself in Haitian. She sounded like she was reciting a prayer… or maybe a curse? The answer came at the end of the day, when Bo called me into his office and announced, with surprising calm, that he was having an attack of hives. His neckline was red, and itchy plaques were beginning to form on his face. He explained that he needed to rush to an emergency room to get an adrenaline shot.
Bo did not believe in voodoo, he said, when I mentioned how his secretary had been mumbling mysteriously all afternoon. But he never yelled at her again. The search was on for a new secretary. The next candidate Cindy sent him was a nose-ringed, grungy activist type with a history of conflict with her supervisors. After that interview, Bo looked like he was ripe for another attack of hives. “This,” he said, “is pure sabotage.”
The rapid deterioration in the relationship between Bo and Cindy accelerated as they jostled to determine who was to be the top dog in the office—a conflict Pasha appeared to encourage. Disputes between directors and special assistants are so common at the United Nations that one might think the idea was written into the organization’s charter. While the director is of higher rank than the special assistant, the special assistant usually has better access to the big boss and can use that access to undermine the director. The conflict followed a classic triangular pattern. To make matters worse, in this case, Pasha was from the “divide and rule” school of management.
Bo’s first order of business was to write a mission statement for the office. So far, our mission statement had been to follow Pasha’s wild mood swings, and Pasha himself had an intriguing way of describing his duties.
“I am the Security Council’s donkey,” he kept saying, before adding, “but even donkeys, sometimes, they kick back!”
Notwithstanding Pasha’s intriguing conception of his role, we were not entirely free to do as we pleased. The source of our mission had been inscribed in UN Security Resolution 986 (1995), so it was not as if we were operating without a mandate. The idea of having a mission statement was to adapt our routines and the structure of our daily interactions to maximize the likelihood that we would fulfill our mandate.
Bo’s mission-statement initiative struck most of my colleagues as a waste of time, because we were constantly running from crisis to crisis. Most of the time, these crises were sparked by Saddam’s conflict with the weapons inspectors. There could be armed conflict at a moment’s notice. We ran pretty much like an emergency operation, and most of us barely had time to catch our breath. Yet Bo was right. If this operation was going to be effective in the long run, it needed more than a donkey-inspired mission statement.
I suggested a meeting to kick off the effort. We invited Pasha to attend, so that it would be clear to everybody that the big boss was fully behind Bo’s initiative. Bo was heading the Division of Program Management. Under his direction, several “chiefs” were supposed to manage the flow of (a) humanitarian reports coming in from Iraq; (b) contracts flowing into the UN system from outside companies; and (c) contracts given by the UN partners working in northern Iraq, where we had responsibility for execution.
Before Bo’s arrival we had spent several months without a director, so most of them were used to reporting directly to Pasha, often using me as a conduit when they were proposing ideas Pasha might dislike. Now Bo wanted Pasha’s explicit support for instituting more structure. It all made sense. But when Bo explained the point of the mission statement at the meeting, Pasha rolled his eyes for the rest of the staff to see, sparking some awkward chuckles.
I went to see Pasha that night, to see if he had just been joking around or if he was really out to undermine my new director. Over a glass of Chivas, I asked him what he thought of Bo’s management style, and he answered me with a question: “You call that style?”
His answer made me laugh, even though technically, it was tragic. What Pasha wanted to know was “why Boo needs to hold all these facking meetings all the time.” Bo had instituted a weekly management meeting of the senior staff. A note of the meeting was written up (usually by me) and copied to Pasha for his information. Yet Pasha didn’t like it one bit when the staff in his office started talking to one another behind his back, and that was precisely what he assumed went on at these meetings.
When I left Pasha’s office late that night, I realized it would be an uphill battle to get the Cypriot and the Swede to work together. Deep down, I knew the dice were loaded from the moment Pasha had said “Boo!” And when I realized that Cindy was at work on her own version of a mission statement for the office, for which she had Pasha’s backing, it dawned on me that we might be in for a catastrophic clash of egos.
Out of desperation, I enrolled in a conflict-resolution seminar at Columbia University. It was a fascinating class, in which I learned to recognize how easily and unnecessarily people manage to offend one another. The conflict-resolution coaches had the same kind of look in their eyes as people in sects. They spoke like they had “seen the light,” and for a time, I thought I had seen the light, too. I became convinced that the problems we had between our senior staff could be resolved if only they would attend a conflict-resolution seminar together. So I raised the idea at our weekly management meeting.
“I think it would be great if all of us could attend this conflict-resolution seminar,” I said, with the same honest-to-God round eyes as the gurus who had indoctrinated me.
During the silence that ensued, the tension rose sharply. Cindy became fidgety, and Bo turned into a rigid block of ice.
“I think it would be great if you just took notes and shadap,” Pasha replied, releasing the tension by causing an uproar of laughter around the table.
“Just an idea, Sir…”
Clearly, I would have to apply the conflict-resolution “techniques” I had learned all on my own.
After a particularly nasty round of Paper Flow Paranoia, Cindy and Bo stopped talking to each other altogether. Bo was not the type of person who would normally refuse to communicate with another staff member, but Cindy was driving him up the wall, and their rivalry was only accentuated by Pasha, who would not rule on the issues that were dividing them.
It got pretty nasty. Bo, with whom I sometimes spoke in French, would refer to Cindy as “la pouffiasse du bout du couloir,” meaning the “bitch down the hall,” and Cindy would refer to Bo as “your boss, that dickhead.”
It is in this context that I tried to apply the “de-escalation” procedure I had learned at the training seminar. As I shuttled between “the bitch down the hall” and my boss, “that dickhead,” I began by trying to reassure each of them that the other was not, actually, “out to get them.” This backfired, because they would then feel I had accused them of being paranoid—an accusation that paranoid people tend to be especially paranoid about. In their defense, they were not wrong to remind me that their nemesis had indeed done a list of things that were offensive. Realizing I was only making matters worse by causing them to concentrate all of their energy on justifying their paranoia, I quickly changed tactics. Rather than deny that wrongs had been committed, I tried to get each of them to understand where the other person was “coming from.”
Now, Bo knew exactly where Cindy was coming from. In his opinion, she was coming from the point of view of someone who was a sexually frustrated control freak. As for Cindy, she knew exactly where Boo! was coming from, too: the United Nations Development Program, which, in Cindy’s book, was synonymous with the Death Star.
The UNDP and the UN Secretariat competed for managerial control of humanitarian operations every time a new mission was drawn up by the Security Council. Secretariat staff thought themselves more able diplomats, and UNDP staff felt they were better managers. I wish I had been tipped off to that long-running, overarching turf war within the UN system before I tried to intervene between Bo and Cindy. Nonetheless, I plowed ahead with my de-escalation efforts. I tried to explain to Cindy that Bo felt undermined when she issued orders directly to some of his staff and that it would be really helpful if she would just ask him to do so himself. I tried to explain to Bo that Cindy was indeed a very controlling woman but that it would probably be smarter just to ignore some of the awkward things she did and focus on the issues. For a while there, I almost thought I had persuaded them to lay down their arms. Increasingly, I felt that both Cindy and Bo were beginning to listen to me more carefully.
As it turned out, the reason I had their attention was not that I was convincing them. It was that they were growing increasingly suspicious of me! The stage was set for a clash that would squeeze the taste for conflict resolution out of me for good.
One afternoon, I walked into Bo’s office to bring him some faxes for his signature. He greeted me with an accusatory stare, then held out a piece of paper and declared: “The plot thickens!”
It made me laugh when he said that because he looked like a suspicious Daffy Duck. But Bo wasn’t joking. I asked him what he meant, and he sent the memo flying across his desk. I had seen it before, since I saw everything that went into Bo’s inbox. It was the memo in which Pasha asked me to draw up a “status sheet” on all the promises we had made in our report to the UN Security Council. The status sheet needed to list who was responsible for following up on each promise and indicate any progress that had (or had not) been made.
The memo was signed by Pasha, but we could tell from its style that Cindy had drafted it. She knew it would cause Bo to blow his top for two reasons. First, the memo was addressed to me, with a cc to Bo, instead of just addressed to Bo, who should have been the person to decide whom he appointed within his own Division of Program Management to do the job. Second, it suggested Bo should have taken such an initiative himself, that he was behind schedule, and that his office would be the one held accountable for any failure to meet the promises made in our report to the Security Council. The translation from UN-ese read as follows: “If anything goes wrong with the largest operation in UN history, we’ll blame it all on you.”
Bo wanted to know how long I had known about this memo, why I hadn’t advised him of it immediately, and why the hell the memo was addressed to me, since I worked for him. I said I didn’t know why it was addressed to me. While I hadn’t run into his office with it, I had obviously placed it in his inbox so he would see it. I explained that the idea of a status sheet had originally been my own, and that I had no idea, when I shared it with Cindy, that she would use this idea to launch a catty memo to him. But all my explanations were to no avail. Bo was now convinced I was in on the plot to undermine him.
All day long, Cindy walked around like a cat licking the cream off her whiskers, and Bo kept barging into my office and barking orders about how he wanted the status sheet to be prepared, saying he wanted it finished by “close of business today.” His anger was compounded when he ran into Cindy on his way out of my office and she asked him how things were going with “Mikey’s status sheet.” Bo was too angry to answer her. And Cindy couldn’t repress a devilish smile.
Cindy’s victory was complete. She had put Bo on the defensive with the bureaucratic equivalent of a Panzer division offensive and at the same time sown distrust between Bo and his closest aide. Cindy had played by the unwritten rule handbook: the assistant of your enemy is your friend.
Close of business came, and I wasn’t done with the status sheet. In fact, I realized that to do it well, I would need to consult with several other offices and that such a process would take days. When I informed Bo of that, he went ape shit. I was in no mood to justify myself. In fact, I felt that if I had to take another second of Bo’s abuse, I would start yelling back even louder. So I left the office early and went out for drinks with my pals from the other side of the street, and when I was sufficiently inebriated, I made a decision to call up my director, tell him I wasn’t going to “take this shit” anymore, and that he could have my letter of resignation on his desk on Monday.
On Monday morning, Bo called me into his office and apologized. Once again, the management training Bo had undergone at some stage in his career served him well, for he knew exactly how to apologize in a manner that was honest, convincing, and dignified. So I accepted his apology. We talked about how we had gotten to the point of a confrontation, and I realized the extent to which he had begun to question my loyalty. Cindy had really done a masterful job of sowing doubt in Bo’s mind. As he retraced the events that had caused him to grow angry, I had to agree that they added up. Bo may have been a tad bit paranoid, but it did not mean Cindy was not out to get him.
In order to put Bo’s increasingly Shakespearean mindset into perspective, I laid my cards on the table and explained that I had tried to “de-escalate” the conflict between him and Cindy. He smiled and told me something I had completely overlooked: “That’s not your job, Michael.”
He was right. It was Pasha’s job. Only Pasha had the authority to impose peace between his director and his chief of staff. My job was to be loyal to my boss. And yet I had to be careful here too, because my boss could leave for another post any day, and then I would still have to deal with Cindy. I was beginning to understand Spooky’s advice: be your own man.
Still, there was a problem with this approach: if I started acting on my own agenda rather than just serving the needs of the office, what was to stop me from becoming a turf warrior like the rest of them?
I called up my father for advice. I took great care to explain to him all the intricacies of the current office politics, but at one point, he interrupted me.
“Sounds to me like you need to make yourself some enemies,” he said.
“What? How can you say something like that? The whole point here is I’m trying to do my job without making enemies!”
“You can’t do that. Listen, it’s good to have lofty goals. But if you just try to be nice to everybody, nobody’s going to respect you. You’ll never get anywhere like this.”
My father made his point clear by recalling the advice that Talleyrand once gave to Napoleon. Talleyrand was France’s top diplomat during the revolutionary wars. Napoleon was considering appointing a young man to a high post, and he asked Talleyrand for his advice. Talleyrand scoffed at Napoleon’s choice. The problem was not so much with the candidate’s youth. The problem, as Talleyrand put it, was that the man had “not even been capable of making a single enemy yet.”
Somehow, that meant something to Napoleon, and the candidate didn’t get the job.
“So go ahead,” said my father. “Make your enemies. Get into people’s faces. But for heaven’s sake, do it for the right reasons!”