Chapter 1:
Claire (the Control Freak) has everything under control
Claire arrived at work at 7 am on Tuesday morning. She was always there one hour before the official starting time to set herself up for the day and clear urgent email ahead of her morning meetings.
Today she really wanted to get on top of things. She had spent most of the past weekend going through a huge set of executive team meeting papers and preparing her contribution for the discussion of each item…which meant she had run out of daylight for her usual Sunday afternoon catch-up on paperwork from the previous week…and returned to work on Monday already feeling behind.
She walked past the empty rows of desks in the open-plan area on her way to her office. She loved being the first one there, while everything was calm and quiet, before the other employees poured in to create chaos. At this time of day, she was full of optimism about what she could achieve over the next twelve hours.
When she reached her office, she walked in and put her things in their regular spots: handbag in the lockable drawer, travel coffee mug on the desk and laptop in the docking station. She took a seat, then grabbed the notepad and pen by her keyboard and turned on her computer.
All set. Let’s do this, she thought, with her usual sense of morning optimism.
But as she typed her login details, she noticed a stiffness in her shoulders and a familiar twinge in her forehead of a headache coming on.
Damn it. Not this again. This is supposed to be my ‘power hour’, she thought, rubbing her temples to ease the oncoming pain. She took a big sip of coffee, then forced her attention back to the monitor.
As always, she opened her calendar before reading her email. She preferred to remind herself of her commitments before she read about other people’s problems and responded to additional requests.
Based on the colour-coded appointments in today’s schedule, it would be another busy day: ‘Monthly executive team meeting’ from 9 am to noon and then ‘Review time’ for most of the afternoon.
She looked at the executive team meeting invite again and smiled to herself. After nearly a decade in middle management, she was thrilled to be at the executive level, where she could have more say in how the government agency was run.
But moving from leading only one branch of Corporate Services to running the entire division hadn’t been easy. Being a senior director had really been doing more of the same thing, while the executive director role was like taking on two new jobs: head of a division and a member of the team leading the entire organisation.
There was also her knack for recognising emerging issues and her desire to get involved in solving them. Both had resulted in more paperwork, more meetings and way too many Sunday afternoons spent wordsmithing project objectives and marking up option papers instead of hanging out with friends.
She looked through her office window at the sun rising over the city skyline, remembering rejecting yet another invite for brunch this past Sunday, then quickly looked back to her screen.
She assumed this state of borderline chaos would be temporary, that things would get easier once she was able to lift the division’s performance to her standards. Yet she was now at the six-month mark and the problems she needed to solve were only piling up. I just need to survive this month, she told herself each month.
But if her boss Sally was able to manage, she would too. Claire had taken over from Sally when she had moved into the Chief Operating Officer role. Sally was firm but fair, approached challenges with calm and grace, and always seemed to have time to give her staff the support and encouragement they needed. Sally had been a key reference for Claire, and Claire wasn’t going to let her down.
As Claire went through her email that Tuesday morning, she sent a few quick responses, then made a note to deal with the rest in the afternoon. One of those included a message to a director in her team who required a bit more handholding—that response would take longer. She also added the titles of the memos she hoped to clear that day, already suspecting her list was too ambitious for the planned three-hour review block.
She hoped there wouldn’t be too many fires to put out; she really needed the afternoon to catch up on the things she hadn’t tackled that weekend. The afternoon was also the time when she had most of her walk-ins—directors and senior directors who needed her input to keep work moving. This messed with her flow and took her out of whatever she was reviewing, but she couldn’t exactly close her door for three hours just to clear her tasks. Not in this role.
She looked at her watch—it was 7.30 am. In about fifteen minutes, staff would start arriving. She wanted to feel on top of the day before people started passing by her office saying ‘good morning’ or chatting about what they’d been up to the previous evening, the TV shows they’d watched—the things that people with actual personal lives did.
She took a quick sip of coffee to steady herself, then committed to an hour or so of responding to more email before she would need to head out to the executive team meeting at 8.45 am.
As she was packing up to leave for the meeting, a new email came in from HR to all directors, senior directors and executive directors (‘the directors’ as everyone in the agency called them): ‘Reminder: Strategic skills course – Module 1 due Friday’.
Oh, crap. She had been so busy with the meeting papers that weekend that she had forgotten to watch the first lot of course videos. It was a course the CEO wanted all directors to complete ahead of the strategic planning exercise starting next quarter.
For her, it would obviously be a refresher. She loved learning and was normally excited to take a new course, but with everything on her plate, she was annoyed at being expected to spend time on something she already knew how to do.
Her strategic skills had landed her the ED role—she was sure of it. She was always thinking at the agency level; she wasn’t like one of those people who only thought about their patch. And working in Corporate Services meant it had always been her job to think about how she could support clients across the agency.
She had initially hoped the course would just be a few videos she could power through over one lunch break. But she had since learned that she would also need to fill out a self-assessment questionnaire and a few worksheets, then discuss them with Sally and a colleague of her choice. This person would serve as a peer reviewer and second accountability partner, alongside Sally.
She had immediately thought to partner with Quinn, who she had gone to university with and who was now Director Corporate Compliance in the Executive Services division. Quinn was quiet and organised and they knew each other well.
As a recent executive team member, Claire definitely didn’t want to be paired up with one of her fellow executives for something like this.
Her plan for the first module was to breeze through the videos and self-assessment and then have quick chats with Sally and Quinn to satisfy the requirement. She added ‘block out time for course videos’ to her to-do list. I’ll worry about that this afternoon, she thought, and took a deep breath, willing away her growing headache.
Before she undocked her laptop, she made sure the folder of annotated meeting papers was on the desktop in case the wi-fi in the boardroom was patchy. You can never be too prepared.
As she walked toward the boardroom, she saw Robert from Regional Services—or ‘Rob’ as everyone else called him—standing near the door. He was scrolling through his phone and looking like he hadn’t spent a single minute of his weekend on the 200-page meeting pack.
Typical, she thought, tightening her grip on her laptop. And now I have to spend three hours in the same room with that attitude.