The Strangest First Day on the Job I Ever Had

I felt more than a little apprehension. I was in morning rush hour traffic, driving to downtown St. Louis from the close-in suburb where I lived. It was something of a new experience. I hadn’t driven in rush-hour traffic since leaving Houston 25 years earlier. The apprehension wasn’t about traffic; I had stepped outside my career experience and accepted a job with St. Louis Public Schools. And I was early; the hours were 8 to 5, but I decided to be there by 7:30. 

Except for nine months at a newspaper straight out of college, my career had been exclusively corporate communications: employee communications, crisis communications, media relations, environmental communications, and speechwriting. Especially speechwriting. Even for the three years I had had my own consulting business, I worked for companies, doing mostly speechwriting. 

 

Corporations have their moments of craziness and crisis, but they pale in comparison to urban school districts. And yet, here I was, driving to my first day on the job at the largest school district in the state of Missouri, a district that had been in crisis for years and was now in hyper-crisis. 

To continue reading, please see my post today at Dancing Priest.

Photograph via St. Louis Public Schools.

Some Wednesday Readings

 

End Game at Appomattox – Mike Phifer at Warfare History Network. 

 

Millennials Tried Being Angry. It Didn’t Work – Samuel D. James at Digital Liturgies.

 

A Memo in the Wilderness: Why does the Church of England now sound like an HR department? – James Martin Charlton at the Critic Magazine.

The Poetry of the Crisis

There’s nothing like a good crisis to demonstrate how little control an organization has. There’s also nothing like a good crisis to uncover the poetry in our souls.

A product cancellation was looming, the cancellation to be imposed by a government agency. Thousands of jobs were at stake, not to mention income, corporate stock price, reputation, and significant disruptions for customers. The crisis had been coming for nearly a year, contained within official communications between the government and the company.

As time passed, internal anxiety grew. In the communications area, we were a relatively minor player, except for the moment at which the crisis would go public. Then we would occupy the most important position in the overall situation. Blow it there, and the product would be destroyed in the marketplace.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Dancing Priest.

Photograph by Ante Hamersmit via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Poetry at Work, Chapter 13: The Poetry of the Crisis

There’s nothing like a good crisis to demonstrate how little control an organization has. There’s also nothing like a good crisis to uncover the poetry in our souls.

A product cancellation was looming, the cancellation to be imposed by a government agency. Thousands of jobs were at stake, not to mention income, corporate stock price, reputation, and significant disruptions for customers. The crisis had been coming for nearly a year, contained within official communications between the government and the company.

As time passed, internal anxiety grew. In the communications area, we were a relatively minor player, except for the moment at which the crisis would go public. Then we would occupy the most important position in the overall situation. Blow it there, and the product would be destroyed in the marketplace.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Literary Life.

Your Work Matters: When Others Don’t Appreciate

I have a job that sounds exciting—I lead the social media team for a large publicly held company.

Every day is different. No day is like any other.

I can plan my day—schedule meetings, carve out chunks of time to get work done, make phone calls, set aside some time for professional development (when it’s social media, you have to keep up)—and about 10 minutes after arriving at my office, I’ll determine whether or not my plans will hold.

They usually won’t.

One recent Wednesday was fairly typical. On the schedule were several meetings, including two with outside agencies assisting with specific projects, one with the company attorney, and another with a visitor from Africa; a special group lunch featuring an outside speaker; and a 90-minute block of time set aside to review a post for the company blog and review online social media activity associated with our company.

I arrived at 8:30. By 8:40, I could see my plans for the day were out the window. 

To continue reading, please see my post today at The High Calling.

Photograph by Petr Kratochvil via Public Domain Pictures. 

Reaching for Quietness

In The Fire of Delayed Answers, author Bob Sorge, discusses two camps (or two dominating ideas) of Christian faith, at least as practiced in the United States. The camp of quietness emphasizes the sovereignty of God; the camp of confidence emphasizes “the availability of God’s promises and power to those who believe.” And there you have to two major wings of evangelical Christianity in America.

We didn’t know it at the time, or refer to it this way at the time, but the terms fit. And they’ve fit for a long time. When we moved to St. Louis in the late 1970s, we had a difficult time finding a church like we had in Houston. In Houston, we attended a church that Sorge would characterize as firmly in the camp of confidence. We couldn’t find a similar church in St. Louis, and we ended up at a church just as firmly in the camp of quietness.

Some years later, we did find a new church (confidence camp) and another that was closer to where we had moved (again, confidence camp). When that church began to blow up, we eventually found our way to where we are now, a Presbyterian church that is heart and soul in the camp of quietness (Presbyterian is another name for “sovereignty,” I think).

The fact is, you need both camps. And the fact is, you rarely find both in the same church. But you can individually keep the two in balance, until, as Sorge puts it, the Assyrians invade and “all hell breaks loose.” He says it’s amazing how quickly “our quietness and confidence can disappear. It can be an enormous challenge to rebuild both quietness and confidence while the crisis continues to rage about us.”

Did someone say crisis? What crisis?

What crisis, indeed.

A very close relative has just been moved to hospice care.

I haven’t had a boss at work in over four months, the organization is being reorganized around us, and I’m not likely to have a boss for at least another four months.

In the past six months, our church has lost almost all of its pastors and some key staff people. The elders are working very hard to lead, which I think will be a very good thing for the long run. In the short term, things seem bewildering at times (and I’m a deacon).

Two of the organizations I write for online are experiencing change, and both are still sorting things out.

It does feel at time the Assyrians have arrived. I don’t feel quiet, and I don’t feel particularly confident.

But I know which camp I lean towards in a time like this one, and that’s the camp of quietness, the cleft in the rock away from the wind and fire.

As Sorge says, hear of the heart of your Father:

“Find a place of quietness in Me by settling your soul and stilling your spirit, and relinquish everything into My hands; and let your heart rise up in confidence in Me, by pressing into My face, devouring My word, claiming My promises, and making the good confession.”

Led by Jason Stasyszen and Sarah Salter, we’ve been reading The Fire of Delayed Answers. Today concludes the discussion on chapter 10, “The Dance of the Two Camps.” To see more posts on this chapter, please visit Sarah at Living Between the Lines.

Photograph by Petr Kratochvil via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Poetry at Work: The Poetry of Crisis

I can’t of anyone working today who doesn’t talk about crises at work. Opportunities seem to abound for missteps, mistakes, false impressions, outright distortions, and rumors both false and true. Social media can amplify and in fact create crises for both organizations and individuals, both of whom can also do a good job of creating crises on their own.

At times, it feels like we careen from crisis to crisis, with everything assuming an urgency that demands immediate attention from too few people. Important, critical work is set aside to deal with crises, sometimes never to be touched again. I once had a boss who referred to this as ‘they tyranny of the urgent at the expense of the important.”

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Photography by Junior Libby via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.