The Plant With No Paint

So many shades of green. Forest green. Olive green. Do-not-eat green. Radioactive tennis-ball green. And, not to forget, a very special does-only-exist-in-Powerpoint green.

I’m jumping on a Teams call with my boss. Our weekly one-on-one. I’m at home and it’s fall. Misty and typical October mood. The heating in our house has been on for a while. Temperatures dropped outside. Lately. Add the computers, monitors and speakers in my room to the floor heating and by lunch it feels like summer. So, I’m in sport shorts. The camera only shows my T-shirt anyhow. Who cares.

The video connects and I see my boss. Already back at whatever he did before he clicked “join”. His eyes are on his second monitor to his left. I say “Hi” to let him know I’m there. He’s in the new building they finished a few weeks ago. Fancy open floor, meeting rooms named after something I keep forgetting. One of those I see, blurred in my boss’s background. With a plant next to the door. A massive thing. A palm tree, I think. Inside a huge concrete-grey pot. It almost touches the ceiling. It must have taken years to grow that big. It’s been there from the start. Those bright green leaves create some sort of weird jungle feeling. Trust me, it’s really huge. And people walk by all the time. In and out of the meeting room. It’s very busy. Not unlike a jungle.

My boss is still on his second monitor when he responds with “Hi Jonas”. His eyes stay left. He is one of those extremely efficient guys who gets all his work done during other’s people’s meetings. I wait a couple of seconds. Silence, which is his trigger to go “So how is it going?”. Which is my trigger to update him on everything that went down last week. The usual procedure with us. In between I ask him about new hires. It takes him a moment to realize he needs to answer. And another moment to come up with one. “Yeah, I need to get an update on that.” Well, not the answer I needed. I let it go. Back to me talking. I’m fine with that. He leaves me alone, I get my work done and that’s the perfect trade. It works, that arrangement. His inattention, weirdly enough, feels like trust. It makes me confident. He’s not checking on me because he doesn’t need to.

Eventually, when I’m done, he looks over and says we still need to talk about this week’s status report.

Unusual. He doesn’t bring topics. He’s a reactor most of the time, not an initiator, at least with me. I bring things up. He nods. Asks a question or says “keep me posted” and we get done with it. Before time runs out.

“You are reporting too much yellow and red this week,” he says. “We need more green.”

I start explaining. I repeat what I mentioned earlier. We’re understaffed. We have scope that was never officially signed off officially. It was just dropped on us. I’m working with the business owners to get things de-scoped. That takes time, to get it done formally. Meanwhile the milestones are what they are. He cuts me off.

“No.” He looks at me intently. “The slide looks bad. It’s all yellow and red. That’s too negative. It sends the wrong message.”

I look at him. Him, covering parts of my favorite plant. In this meeting. Every week. The big not-moving jungle plant. With its huge green leaves. How much water it must need. I wonder how often someone must take care of it. To let it grow.

“But the status is yellow and red.”

“Well, that’s a different topic. We can discuss that.” He shifts. Just a little bit. “But it’s more important right now to send the message that we are handling our stuff. That we are on top of things. We need management to trust us.”

Six months earlier this guy had been given the majority of the new product. It was a big deal internally. The whole corporate promotion package came along with it. He was the person they selected to build something big because his track record said he would. I’d looked him up when I got moved to him. Fancy company A, then a VP role at another one (let’s call it company B), then poached back. Even fancier company C. Or D. Whatever, it’s that CV with a move up every two years. Bigger team. Better title. Rocket-like.

“So you’re asking me to lie.”

“Don’t twist my words.” He responds tightly.

“I’m not.”

He’s quiet. Looks at me. I don’t say anything else. I’m used to silence. As a tool. Usually, I can hold it. Let the other one speak first. Even when I’m angry. I look at the palm tree again. Unconsciously. Drifting off a little bit, mentally, thinking, is anyone dusting off these huge leaves? He doesn’t answer. And I’m really, really pissed. So, he wins. I finally end the silence. I shouldn’t have.

“If you want green lights, go to the meeting and present them yourself. I won’t.”

He went. He presented. He reported green. Painted his picture of do-not-eat green. Not all green, but mostly. PowerPoint green. And I, I stopped looking up to him.

I don’t know what he said in the meeting. I didn’t go. I’d been the one presenting the report for eight months. I also didn’t go the next time. Eventually, I got dropped from the invite. My boss had it handled. That was it. Nobody asked. Nobody explained. It had been mine. Now it wasn’t anymore. Professionally handed over.

Our one-on-ones continued. Same online meeting, same time, same background. But he stopped bringing substance. Not like he had brought much before. He’d ask how I was doing. I’d say fine and he’d say good. Then we’d wait. He’d sometimes fish for information he needed for the status report. At least he wrote it himself, I’ll give him that, and didn’t ask me to prepare it. The clock became my best friend in these meetings. I counted. A lot. At some point he’d finally say “alright, anything else?” and I’d answer no. The screen would go black. The plant would disappear.

The irony of that. The plant shining green. Mocking me. Writing this, I almost started making some clever metaphor about leadership, growth, nurturing and so on. How trust needs watering. That would’ve been unbearable. And way too corny. You get the message.

Still, the plant was there. Every week. Every one-on-one. Showing me green. Without dust. And no paint. Reliably.

I stayed another couple of months. I did good work. As I always do. But the things that had made the job mine gradually felt like being pulled away from me. One by one, not dramatically, just quietly. Someone else included in some meetings. Someone else to take care of an ad-hoc topic. Someone else got asked for my opinion.

I was still on the team. Or rather on the payroll. That term fit better. I was still there. Somehow also not really there anymore. He remained above me for another couple of months. Mostly on the org chart.

It’s a strange thing, being slowly removed without being told about. It would have been easy to put all the blame on my boss. I mean how shitty is such a move? The thing is, the paint job worked. Taking care of something takes years. Painting it green takes one meeting. So they started trusting him. All but me. His reputation stayed as good as it ever was. Improved even. He’d surely take the next step once his two years were done.

In a system that works. Or doesn’t. I don’t know. Intelligence, reckless and shady. That is him. I’ll give him that.

I quit in early spring. March, I think. Most of me had left months earlier, one meeting at a time. Our last Teams call just started. Same background. Same plant. Still cool outside. Still shorts. Electronics, you remember. For some reason the flat light in his office was bright this time, harsh, making webcams overexpose. The image hurting to look at. I told him I was leaving. He nodded. He said he understood, that these things happen, that he’d always valued my work. The standard speech. He knew it by heart. It’s always the same. I remember that his eyes still went left. Something more important than this conversation. He handled it while he was saying goodbye.

I said thanks. He said he wished me well. The clock ticked. The screen went dark.

The plant disappeared from my view. Bright green. With no paint.

Someone was taking care of it.