People frequently tell me I have executive presence, which makes me feel like I’ve been playing dress-up and nailed the illusion. Imagine a little girl with wild curly hair, wearing a lacy thrift-store blouse as a gown, a frilly slip as a skirt, and panty hose for a tail. Someone says, “You’re so glamorous,” which the little girl already believes but wanted oh-so-much to hear anyway.
That’s me and executive presence. Simultaneously, I feel like maybe I can actually get some s**t done now, and I want to roll on the floor with my sister and giggle about how ridiculous it all is.
Pretense & journalism
I often feel multiple things at once, especially at work. After the requisite service jobs and teaching during my MFA in poetry, my first professional work is editing a glossy 88-page magazine. We make a great pretense of objective journalism about medicinal herbs—garlic, goldenseal, ashwagandha, and everyone’s favorite, echinacea. I wear my mother’s out-of-fashion blazers to work and pretend to know something about running a magazine with a .5M operating budget.
Even with my education in literature and creative writing, I know what we’re writing is BS. My heart feels all yucky when the “famous” herbalists on our editorial board puff up because someone challenged their assertions about plants-as-natural-panacea. All while they make millions off plants ground to lifeless dust in factories.
But I love the photo shoots. Damn, I love the photo shoots—beautiful dishes, fragrant raw herbs, dried mushrooms, and general fetishism of plants.
Feeling all these contradictory things, unable to resolve them, I decide that I don’t know enough to judge. I make peace with myself by printing words like “might” or “ask your physician before using” or “further research needs to be done.” When people call to ask if they can take warfarin and ginseng together (not a good idea), I sidestep by saying, “I’m just an editor. Please talk to your doctor.”
Power without responsibility is so tempting.
Fast-forward through a fascinating new job every few years: Freelance art journalism. Building online courseware about service dog training. Managing beautiful, wounded young men a Seattle Kinko’s. Marketing bodywork in Santa Fe. Doing graphic design for an alternative weekly. A Hail Mary return-to-school to study biology that led to a profitable math-and-science tutoring business.
Around then, I find myself divorced, childless, and 43.
A seasonal tutoring business is no longer workable. So I learn modern Web design and take a job split 50/50 between Web-mastering and managing a clerical team of college students.
Fairly quickly, because I’m lazy, I nurture this team into a self-managing group. They train and help each other, maintain their own “procedures manual,” and keep everything super organized. I stick my head in once a day for a standing meeting where we talk about the work in front of a tracking whiteboard (something I had learned at the magazine).
Eventually, I play matchmaker and farm them out to research scientists and staff. They’re bored. I’m bored. Why not? They get to analyze satellite images, write scripts, inventory devices, learn science writing, and cater events for NASA. They’re great kids, even if I have to teach them how to use a fax machine and wash lettuce.
Enter agile. Beautiful agile.
This is going so well, someone in power decides I should be a ScrumMaster. I read the Scrum Guide and think “heck, this seems logical and familiar.” Why not? I heard the developers were assholes, but my current boss was kind of a twit. So in I go.
Once the 10 developers have their moment with a “Scrum Mistress” poster, they’re actually really good to me. They let me spend lots of time building and adjusting a kanban board with long thin lines of tape. They put up with my 11x17 full-color cumulative flow diagrams. They sometimes let me touch Pivotal Tracker. And they answer all of my questions, patiently and with minimal arrogance.
So, I do my best for them. I pull the 12 (yes, twelve for ten) product owners into a room, draw a big schedule, and make them negotiate for developer capacity, to keep them from sneaking into the room with urgent requests. I drag the technical writers in for regular touch-base talks. I bastardize Kent Beck’s famous quote about XP and write “Agile is about making the world safe for software developers” above the kanban board. (Good poets borrow, Kent. Great poets steal.) And I push hard on the directors to make sure they know what Scrum is really supposed to be. They want that, right?
Wrong. I’m invited to find a new job.
Influence without power is a different dance. One I don’t know yet.
They say you’re not really an agilist until you’ve been fired at least once. When I’m hired two months later, as a junior agile coach with double the salary, I begin to believe something more is possible.
More next week. In the meantime, connect with me via comments. Let’s talk!