Managing Maddening Mediocre Managers
Making good trouble because I had no choice in the matter
My long-retired former boss’ boss’ boss Sandra Lauffer made herself into my nemesis from the time of my second interview at the large NGO once known as the Academy for Educational Development (AED — now FHI 360) in November 2000. I was interviewing for the assistant director position with the New Voices National Fellowship Program. Up to that point, I’d been pretty flawless in my approach of finding an in through my nonprofit connections for this job, and in the two interviews so far.
Then I met Lauffer. During the 30-minute meeting, the aging, polite white Southern woman went on and on about my “lack of experience for the job. When I look at your resume, you only have three years of full-time management experience. Your time teaching students does not count.” She said this with derision, you see.
I wanted to cuss the racist debutante out right then and there. For a microsecond, I thought about confirming whatever racist stereotypes she had about Black folk like me. I’d lay her out, then pick her up off the floor by her blouse’s neckline and by her bum, and slam her head-first into the thick office windows on the seventh floor of 1825 Connecticut Avenue, NW, keeping her body as horizontal as I could while breaking her neck in the process.
Instead, I said, “If you look, my cv says ‘Selected Job Experience.’ All that is listed here is my work experience since earning my PhD. As far as my teaching experience goes, managing students is a lot like managing staff. You have to find ways to delegate tasks and responsibilities so that students — or in this case, the people working with you — can get their work done.”
I had already done some background research on Lauffer. She had done her undergrad at The Sorbonne in Paris (its library holds a copy of my first book, Fear of a “Black” America, by the way) and graduated in 1964. She grew up in Jim Crow Virginia and DC. Despite her best efforts, Lauffer couldn’t hide her genteel anti-Black racism any better than Donald Trump can hide his misogyny and grifting.
My Blackness and my PhD with experience threatened her, so she threatened back, and not just during the interview process. “If you don’t like it here, you can leave. I’ll be here longer than you,” she said. All because I spoke up for the junior staff on the project, trying to protect them from her shitty office politics. Roxane Gay is right. “Nemeses aren’t born. They are made,” as Gay wrote in Bad Feminist.
Yeah, she was a nemesis. Anytime someone plays down your accomplishments while playing up their significance, that cannot be anything else to you but a nemesis. But I didn’t hate her. My immediate supervisor Ken, though, with his staggering amount of closeted insecurities and his untreated bipolar disorder with paranoid tendencies, rushed down the long hall between our officers and hers at least three times a week in the 40 months I worked for New Voices. It was like he was running daily Acela trains from DC to New York. He always sought her out for advice, calling her a “wise woman,” a “guru,” and a “mentor.” I thought, Are you kiddin’ me with this shit? Do you have any experience running anything? Do you have a backbone for making any decisions at all?
Maybe some of this was my fault. I had only shared about a third of my total job experience when I applied for the New Voices position at AED. It was deliberate on my part. Typing up my working for my father at 14 and 15 years old while attempting to keep him sober, a job at a mail-sorting firm at 16, a paid internship with General Foods at 17, and jobs running computer labs and working in mental health settings between undergrad and my first two years of graduate school. It all seemed irrelevant to me.
As it turned out, I so badly downplayed my experience that I put myself in a job I was overqualified to be in, and around insincere and insecure white mediocrity too.
Whatever the dynamics were, I thought I could handle them, because I had met the challenge of such -isms before. In a six-year stretch between 1992 and 1998, my previous bosses had charged me with the task of writing detailed reports about their agency. Between Westchester County Department of Community Mental Health, Allegheny County Department of Federal Programs (with a heavy emphasis on the Job Training Partnership Act), and Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh’s grant from what is now the Bill & Melinda Gates foundation (more on the last two in another Substack), I had done more pre-PhD government and nonprofit work than any of my twenty-something peers. I had two years’ worth of evaluation and report writing experience, which also gave me some low-level program management experience, too.
It wasn’t something I had prepped to spell out on a resume or cv, however. At two of those three stops, I ended up writing reports that exposed unethical behavior and hostile work environments. The thing was, all three stops were with government agencies with quasi-nonprofit tendencies. What I did and I learned in these jobs with these agencies was far more applicable than anything I had done to earn the PhD or in working with students, at AED, with New Voices, and with racist bosses like Lauffer and Ken Williams.
At Westchester County Department of Community Mental Health, I learned a decade before my first encounter with Lauffer about how jealous, threatened, and normal mediocrity is in the workplace. I did learn other, more useful stuff, too. With the county, I learned a ton about abnormal personality disorders. I learned how to use the DSM-III and DSM-IV (The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) codes to properly bill New York State for five years’ worth of incorrect Medicaid and Medicare billing at the Mount Vernon clinic (they made $371,000 off my work in the summer of 1989).
I also learned through observation the racist use of the DSMs to overdiagnose Black folk with schizophrenia while severely underdiagnosing narcissistic personality (and related social personality disorders) among white folk. At the main office in White Plains in 1990 and 1991, I learned how to build databases for research and data management purposes, putting my computer science skills to work even after switching to history as my major.
But what I learned most of all was how to manage the people who managed me and to use the power of the written word in doing so. That occurred during my third and final stint with Westchester County and my second summer working in the Mount Vernon clinic, just across the bridge and off the Mount Vernon East Metro-North stop.
Most of the cast of characters were the same, between the Black women in the office pool, the Jamaican American office administrator Valerie Johnstone, and the nearly all-white clinical staff. Still, they were short-staffed when compared to my first run there in 1989 (two people had retired in the three years in between). The clinic director who had come on board after my 1989 run in the clinic was a Dr. Robert Williams, a Black man who had a degree from Yale Medical School. I took the job because I couldn’t find work in Pittsburgh in 1992, and my master’s degree assured that I couldn’t take a job in a city now tilted heavily toward low-paying, service industry work or highly-skilled technical work.
Johnstone had already given me a hard time my first time around. On my first day, she sent me out with a 65-year-old Black man she only referred to as “Charlie” to pick up heavy furniture, a piece of which fell on my big right toe, splitting the nail in half (the nail never recovered, and I had it removed in 2011). She yelled at me in front of the office pool and the clinic’s patients because I arrived at work eight minutes after nine in the morning. It was my third week on the job — a Friday in July 1989 — and it was the first time I didn’t get in right at 9 am.
That day, I waited until everyone left. I walked into her office, and I said, “I am sorry I arrived late today. I will try not to do it again. But you will never, ever, yell at me in front of staff again. You got a problem with me, you bring me into your office. But you will not do that again!” I left for the weekend, only to come back Monday morning to the office staff giving me a standing ovation, claps and all, because at least one of them had overheard my exchange.
Johnstone’s issues were multifold. She hated being lumped with American Black folk like me who could trace their ancestry to the Jim Crow South and to slavery in the US. “I am Ja-mai-can,” she sometimes said with a raised voice in refusing to identify with her African American staffers. She frequently accused me of thinking that I was better than her, and in our first meeting during my 1992 stint, said, “See, I have a master’s degree, too.” She was 60 years old to my 22 at the time. She could pass the brown-paper-bag rule, and she acted like it, too, in frequently flirting with more senior staff in the county. She was an elitist who herself showed up late for work, who’d call off for the day at the last minute, and who otherwise lived like the affluent, refined Jamaican woman she saw herself as.
Our respective boss Dr. Williams was no better. Williams once mentioned he knew the late Black historian John Blassingame when they were both at Yale pursuing their advanced degrees. He said to me, over and over for two months, “We’re not like the rest of them here.” I knew what he meant. His Ivy League degrees and my movement toward the educational elite as a PhD student allegedly separated us from the “cotton-picking mentality” of the office pool and the lack of advanced education among them. We were also hunkered down in a clinic full of Black and Brown patients and with a lily-white staff of psychologists and psychiatrists working there.
Had I needed to work there for more than one summer, I would have needed to confront his Head-Negro-In-Charge persona more directly. Really, I was just trying to collect my $7.70-an-hour paychecks, pay my rent in Pittsburgh, help out my mom and siblings, and move on for my doctorate.
But two weeks before the end of my time with the county and the clinic, Dr. Williams gave me an ultimatum. He wanted me to write a report that would implicate Johnstone as both incompetent and capricious as the office manager. Williams said, “people like us need to stick together.”
I approached my task the same way I approached a research project. I interviewed my co-workers — at least in a way without them knowing that I was doing a formal interview — about their problems with Johnstone and about their refusal to learn the new computers and billing system for the office. I documented various incidents that I either experienced or witnessed in which Johnstone was far from professional. I even discussed the overall office dynamics and argued that they were the reason why the clinic had fallen behind twice in the past decade on hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of Medicaid and Medicare billing to New York State.
But then I went one step further. I put together two versions of the report. One version was specifically for Dr. Williams, one that could justify the demotion — if not the firing — of Johnstone. The other, much fuller version was one in which I made the case that Dr. Williams and Johnstone were both culpable as they created an unprofessional and chaotic atmosphere at the clinic. It wasn’t just their violent language and their nasty public and private arguments. Their mercurial natures and their lack of respect for the office and each other had trickled down to the office staff.
When I handed in version one to Dr. Williams on my last day of work, he was giddy with delight. He surprised me with a hug and a handshake. I left work early that day, and immediately took the 40 bus up to White Plains, to the main Westchester County Department of Community Mental Health on Post Road. I went to Bob Beane’s office (the department’s director, the man who first hired me in 1989), and dropped off version two of my report.
The following Friday morning, I went to the Mount Vernon clinic one last time, to pick up my final summer paycheck. I ended up meeting with Beane in Johnstone’s office and explained what had been going on at the office between Dr. Williams and Johnstone over the previous eight weeks, and likely over the previous three years. Beane had already fired Dr. Williams and demoted Johnstone and moved her to the Yonkers clinic. I was relieved to be done with mean and incompetent people and lazy, plodding work and plotting workers.
I was a fool to think that this would be the last time. Even at 22, I should have known better. I had already worked at places where white mediocre folk felt threatened by Black folk, like in Pittsburgh like Western Psychiatric Institute and Clinic, just the year before. A PhD program at Pitt and later at Carnegie Mellon would hit me over and over again with the lesson that “highly educated” ≠ excellence in one’s work or professional behavior. If anything, among those with advanced degrees, the mediocrity and the flippant hostility that comes with it runs more rampant, whether at a university, a government agency, or an NGO.
There are a shit-ton of lessons I learned in working in government and quasi-nonprofit jobs even before I began my PhD work at Pitt and Carnegie Mellon. One was that mediocrity was everywhere because of the nepo-rule, “it’s not what you know, it’s who you know.” Most people beyond receptionist and administrative assistant with a job weren’t there purely on merit. Most of my bosses had an insider who helped them get into a position with any iota of authority, and most of them had no prior management experience — they did not “work their way up.”
As for me, I had already earned my way into mid-level management. I now had experience managing budgets, evaluating programs, and evaluating work sites. I also now learned what to do and what not to do in managing my mercurial, jealous-hearted, and often mediocre managers.
These hostile and difficult work environs prepped me for the big-time nonprofit administrator work I’d end up doing for most of the 2000s. Yet I was also not prepared. As a PhD student, at least I had my studies and my coursework as a fall-back position from the maddening grind of full-time work in hostile work environs in 1992. I had not prepped for the likes of Lauffer, Williams, and others to waste my time with distraction, to ruin my calm, and to disrupt my plans for my future. I had not prepared, because whether at 22 or at 30, I still believed merit would conquer all.