She Gave a Single Dad the Worst Office in the Building — He Turned It Into the Busiest Room
Chapter 4
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And on his second Monday, a request came from a woman named Megan Alcott in corporate accounts, who had been with the company eight months and was close to tears about a maintenance ticket. The ticket had been returned to her six times for a missing cost code; the cost code did not exist because the site had been added under a master agreement amendment and never coded separately, and no one would create the code without an approval, and no one would approve it without a code.Graham asked her who the three people were who kept returning it. Then he called all three and asked them to come down to B-17 at 2:00. And because it was 2:00 on a Monday, and because nobody had anything to protect yet, all three came.It took 42 minutes: not because anyone was brilliant, but because the three of them had never been in the same room. And when they were, it took four minutes to establish that contract control owned the coding decision, and the rest of the time to write down what each of them would do and by when. Graham wrote the outcome in a spiral notebook with the date, the names, and the next step. At the bottom, he wrote the name of the person who had actually made the decision, which was not his.Darren Cole heard about it on Wednesday and came down to tell him to stop. Darren ran corporate client care; he was 39, and he had survived two reorganizations by being extremely careful about which rooms he was seen in."Blair's people are pulling the badge logs for this floor," he said. "You know that, right? You're building something down here and she's already decided what to call it.""I'm not starting a department," Graham said. "I'd just like people to stop sending each other the same email for three weeks.""That's what it looks like to you."Graham thought about it that night, standing in his kitchen while the dishwasher ran, and decided Darren was probably right, and that it did not change anything.The next morning, he cut a rectangle out of the side of a copier paper box, wrote eight words on it in black marker, and taped it to the frosted glass of the door:
Bring me the problem nobody wants.
When he came down the following morning with his coffee, three people were waiting in the corridor, each holding a different folder.The method he settled on was not a method so much as a refusal: every problem that came through the door had to leave with three things written down—a name, a date, and a next step. Not a department: a name.Graham had spent 14 years watching responsibility dissolve the moment it was assigned to a group, and the single change he made—the only one—was to insist that a human being say out loud what they would do and when they would do it, while other human beings watched.