The ordinary and anxious work of transferring power
Mid-November
Tanya's office had two doors, one to the hallway and the other into the Director's office. She enjoyed the buzz of staff waiting to talk to the Director and recently the buzz had taken a different tenor. The city had a Mayor-elect. The current mayor had served the maximum two terms so everyone knew change was coming. Now it had a name and a transition team.
Tanya had worked at the agency for ten years, and had seen one mayoral transition before, although not this close. Eight years ago her desk sat in the middle of a bullpen and she heard a steady office hum of phone calls, chats, and a few self-talkers. That November the rumblings from colleagues had also shifted. One manager was so worried that all he spoke about was setting up coffees with people he thought were close to the next mayor. She realized later that none of those people ended up having much influence. The manager took a new job within a few months.
Now, from her well-organized desk (the vast majority of her job was keeping everyone organized), she saw the change in the staff's energy echoed a change in her boss's work. The Director's office was notable not only for its surprisingly good window views for local government, but also for its three shelves full of books and one wall plastered with chart paper filled with a myriad of words, diagrams, and even one drawing by the Director's four-year-old. The nature of this chart paper had morphed in recent weeks. Far fewer unstructured brainstorms. Far more lists of priorities and things to do. And many more colorful sticky notes to help track small details that couldn't be lost before January.
Tanya remembered walking the Director into this office for the first time. It was much emptier then. No bookshelves, no chart paper. Just the standard government-issued furniture, some holes in the walls where art had hung, and a surprising number of bankers boxes. They were full of binders of things that the previous Director didn't want to throw away but also didn't really know what to do with. So he quietly made it someone else's problem.
There was also a large rolling TV. As they walked in, the Director immediately ordered it wheeled somewhere else. Someone else's problem. Tanya had asked him multiple times whether he wanted a TV installed on the wall for presentations. The Director muttered something about the blight of PowerPoint decks. Tanya hadn't realized until now that the Director must love that chart paper because it was something tangible. Every now and then she would hear a commotion in a meeting as the Director frantically rustled through piles of old chart paper to find a golden nugget written months or years ago.
Tanya was used to hearing visitors using the time in her office for last minute preparations for the meeting ahead. These days, the usual meet and greets and general meetings were replaced with time spent with staff working to finish priority projects and trying to fill some important positions. At the same time as the Director worked to solidify his projects and staff, he wanted to look helpful to the transition team to increase the chances of these projects and people continuing across administrations. This meant lots of memo preparation and plenty of binders of project information for the transition team and the new leadership. While the Mayor-elect said that some directors may be asked to stay, Tanya sensed the Director knew he would be leaving at Inauguration, but did not want to say as much.
The week of Thanksgiving
Tanya got a call she had been expecting. The Agency Review Team or "ART" wanted a meeting with the Director and his senior team. These teams helped the transition and Mayor-elect determine what would be priorities and also helped build the next budget. She heard one junior staffer quip that "there was nothing art-y about them." The staff saw the ARTs as people who may or may not understand the work asking questions with critical implications. The ARTs would be receiving all the memos and binders and turning them into their own memos and binders. Tanya scheduled the meeting to be in two days.
Most of the meetings in the Director's office had a formality about them. Before COVID, that was men in suits and ties and women in heels. These days, most of the outside attendees arrived in business casual. While there were far fewer ties, there were still plenty of jackets. Even with staff, there was a sense that passing the threshold from Tanya's office into the Director's office was about formal respect for the public agency's work, even if the Director was not overly formal or serious.
The ART team arrived at Tanya's office a respectable five minutes early. The head of the team, someone who had been a high-level official in the government a few administrations ago, showed up with a tailored-suit-sans-tie look that said "I hold power but am not too stuffy." Tanya guessed that he used to wear French cuffs before the pandemic. The rest of the team had a mixture of attire from full suit and tie to what could be called Silicon Valley hoodie chic. Some wore more formal leather soled shoes or heels while others had trendy sneakers on. One was wearing bike shoes.
As they waited they bantered and laughed. One of the ART team mentioned how last Sunday she had squeezed in a run for the first time since the election.
The Director opened the door and invited everyone in. Tanya was taken aback by the lack of chart paper and colorful stickies. And the rolling TV was back with a PowerPoint presentation. Stripped of its quirkiness, it could have been a set for a TV show about local government. On the meeting room table were binders. On the screen was the intro slide with the agency name, logo, date and "Agency Review Team discussion" in big title letters. As everyone took their seats, Tanya offered coffee and water. Almost everyone from the ART asked for coffee and the agency staff demurred. She handed it out and as she was leaving noted how different this meeting felt from any meeting she had set up.
The day before Inauguration
Tanya did not know if the Director had been asked to stay, but as she suspected, he was leaving and had agreed to "turn out the lights." Tanya had worked with the team to host a farewell party that day, including a gift of an official city street sign with the Director's name on it and the four-year-old's chart paper art, framed.
As the Director packed his personal items, Tanya asked him whether he wanted to take home any of the chart paper. He chuckled and gave an emphatic "hell no." He then walked into Tanya's office and gave her a farewell bouquet of flowers, a handwritten card, and a wrapped snow globe from his hometown (he knew Tanya's daughter collected them). He thanked her for all her work and said "you were an amazing colleague." She thanked him back and in the awkward silence that followed she felt his impending absence for the first time. He quietly turned and walked out of her door into the hallway.
Tanya began the tedious work of packing up the office. After the ART meeting, it had pretty quickly returned to the idiosyncratic decor of chart paper and stickies. PowerPoint decks were banished. A new Director had not yet been named, so the agency's General Counsel had been selected as interim. Tanya had always gotten along with her, but their conversations never veered from the realm of work. A few days ago Tanya asked what she needed in the office. "A desk, a chair, and a computer, thank you." So this would be purely an exercise of removal.
Tanya began boxing up all the books. She put the office supplies in other boxes to be used later. She took down the framed wall hangings and leaned them against each other along the wall. Then there were those intractable binders. The Director had at least put them on shelves but had never, to her knowledge, touched them again. Should she throw them away? Box them up? Leave them there?
As the office became denuded, Tanya thought about how she enjoyed this job, even if she did not enjoy the particular anxiety-producing aspect of transition. Would the next Director want to bring in their own person? She had to let that question go, as it was outside of her control. She moved on by imagining walking the new Director into their office for the first time. It would be empty but for some binders. They would look around with interest and a hint of hesitation and then ask "Can you get one of the rolling TVs in here?"
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