The First Thing to Sort Out

Late 2017. I’d not long started in a new team.

Just before nine, and I’d only just sat down. Not even settled, that bit before the day starts, before the first cup of tea. Coat maybe still on the back of the chair.

My desk was in the corner, looking out over the whole team. A colleague, a friend, sat across from me. She used to say the corner desk made me look like a teacher watching the classroom. She was in early that morning. So was finance, down the far end behind the partition. You could set your watch by finance. I couldn’t see them from where I sat. But I knew they were there.

The phone went. A senior colleague, looking for my manager, who wasn’t in yet. He’d take me instead.

It was a follow-up to a meeting we’d had a month before. Ordinary stuff. I don’t really remember what we said, that’s how unremarkable it was. The call was going perfectly fine.

Then, without warning, he went on the attack.

I felt it before I understood it. Heart rate up. Breathing gone shallow and quick.

He accused my department of doing nothing for him. Said I was speaking to him like he was a child. Threatened to take it further, formally.

None of it was quite abusive. That was the thing about him. He knew exactly how far to push and he pushed right to the line, never over it. A fist in a glove. In the moment it just felt like being attacked before I’d had my tea.

The first thing I had to sort out wasn’t him. It was me. I couldn’t say anything useful while my heart was going like that.

So I took the phone away from my ear. Far enough to get my breathing back. Close enough to hear if he was still going, like a kettle that hadn’t finished boiling.

A few seconds of that and I could think again.

And the moment I could think, I could feel the room.

Every head in sight had gone down. That’s the tell. People don’t look at you when they’re listening hard — they look away, busy themselves, drop their eyes to the screen. The whole team, suddenly very focused on their own work. My friend across from me. Finance behind the partition, where I couldn’t see them but didn’t need to. I’d been to a bullfight in Seville once. The matador isn’t only fighting the bull. He’s working the crowd at the same time, and he can’t let either one see which has his attention. That was the morning. The bull on the phone. The crowd at their desks, heads down. Both at once, and neither allowed to know.

And thinking was the point. While he ran on, I wasn’t planning what to fire back. I was remembering something.

Years before, in my first job in the properties team, I’d sat near my manager, Albert, while he took a call from a furious landlord. Accusations flying, the lot. Albert didn’t raise his voice once. At one point he just said: “I’m not sure where this has come from. Let’s lift it and put it to one side.”

Lift it and put it to one side. I’d never forgotten it. It doesn’t argue with the accusation. It doesn’t accept it either. It just picks the whole thing up and moves it out of the way so you can both see what’s underneath.

So that’s what I did. I didn’t defend the department against the charge of doing nothing. I didn’t take the bait on being spoken to like a child. I said:

“I’m not sure where this has come from, we’ve been having a good conversation. I’m going to lift it and put it to one side.”

And that gave me the space to put one true thing in front of him: “After our meeting, I sat down with your team and we went through the options.”

That had happened. He knew it had happened.

He didn’t have anywhere to go after that. So he switched, the aggression gone, the charm back, as if it had never happened. By the end of the call, in the way these things sometimes turn, he invited my manager and me over for coffee.

I put the phone down. The heads at the desks came back up. Nobody said anything.

A couple of months later a few of us were in Katy Daly’s, at a table on the balcony that looks down over the bar, not our usual spot. Paddy and JC, two of the finance lads, asked if I’d ever worked operationally, on the front line. I had. Why? Because they’d overheard that call, months back, and reckoned it was a masterclass in de-escalation.

It wasn’t. I’ve thought about it since and I didn’t do anything clever. I got a grip of myself before I opened my mouth. That was the whole thing. The rest, Albert’s line, the one fact I put in front of him — none of it would have worked if I’d answered him with my heart still going.

I found out later he had a reputation for it. That he liked to go in hard on the new ones, see what they were made of. I’d been there for a few months.

So maybe it was a test. If it was, I think I passed it the moment I took the phone away from my ear — before I’d said a single word.