On this date in 2007, I reported to my first day of (temp) work at my new job at Mahler Private Staffing (MPS). I had been given a 3 - 4 week assignment, through Manpower Group, to work as an Administrative Assistant to a private service search firm. When I took the job, I didn't know what "private service" was, and I have to say, it seemed all pretty weird.
In those early days, I was writing ads and candidate profiles and conducting strange specialty research projects (I'll just say that I know a lot more about ornamental gardening than anyone who has a yard like mine!). I was invited to stay on in a permanent* part-time role, and spent a few days a week at their office, which became the mid-point of my normal bus commute (in those days it was the pre-Green Line, which I think was #11) from the Colonel to UW-M.
I spent that first school year back in Wisconsin alternating between my academic/teaching brain & my officeTeam persona, and I wasn't too terribly disappointed when May came around, and I was summarily dismissed with no reason given - I just went and found another temp job - first as a receptionist at a home health care company (where I was able to stream much of the Euro 2008 soccer tourney during work), and later as the global economy crumbled around us, at Northwestern Mutual (where internet surfing was restricted, so I read the company's financial newsletter and had a front row seat to the inner workings of the financial crisis, in between planning corporate events such as baseball-themed ice cream socials and 5-, 10-, 15- & 20-year service honoring ceremonies).
When I was called back to MPS in August 2010 to work on a project, and later invited to take on a permanent** role in November as the "Candidate Librarian" (my invented title - never over the course of the subsequent decade was I ever clear about what my title was), I was intrigued and also delighted to see how much had changed. What I loved most about my work over the last decade, other than the people I got to know and work alongside, was the commitment to quality. Doing all aspects of the work well felt like a fundamental shift from 2 years earlier, when the whole company felt very transactional. A client of ours, who I met in Manhattan in 2013, perhaps said it best: "MPS is the best, because they actually give a shit."
There were some new faces, and some old familiar folks, and in my first year back in the role a lot of sweeping changes occurred, which thrust me more to the fore, and I began take on significant search and recruiting work, in addition to my continuing librarian role. In August 2012, shortly before starting my final school year of teaching at UW-M, I took my first work trip. I was working on a housekeeper search for a client with a home in Palm Beach, FL, and we decided I would travel to South Florida to meet the finalist candidates. I stayed at the Brazilian Court Hotel, and 10 minutes after my arrival it was clear that I was an impostor... but it was was fun to be so. I'm not monied, and will never be so no matter what fortunes the future permits.
More than anything, what my decade plus at MPS has shown me is that the presumed distinction that the monied believe in is a last desperate charade. Not all of our wealthy clients (UHNW - as in ultra-high net worth) were, in fact, monied. They had money, of course - obscene amounts of it - but some understood the arbitrary stupidity of it. Most, though, prefer to construct mythologies wherein their privilege is anything but. Their wealth was worked toward, earned, a just reward for the cleverness and astuteness and wherewithal of them or their forebears. What I learned was that this entitlement most often took the form of elaborate narration.
We construct the world around us by telling its story - to ourselves or anyone else who will listen - and my time at MPS helped me develop the skill of listening to those narratives and finding ways to accommodate them. There was a more sycophantic version of this accommodation, where it is largely accepted, but my method was more to understand it, act as if it were normal, and then find the right people who could fit into the story that was being told.
And so I spent the next decade of my life at work trying to be a part of building something. I remained myself (which was fundamental to my undoing in the end... and in the middle), but also came in to myself, and when I started running most of the East Coast search work in 2013 I had to opportunity to begin creating and inhabiting my own mythologies. When I would walk into the UES apartment of a client of ours (say the founder of a company that is a household name), and they would often look at me and wonder just what, precisely, I was doing there. (On only one occasion, though, did the client actually voice this question).
Mostly, we would shoot the breeze - on the more enjoyable occasions finding common ground (a connection to Wisconsin, or an interest in my dissertation work on Haiti), but more often than not, they would talk about themselves. (Not terribly surprising, as I was there to learn them, but it was equally easy to learn them regardless of the topic of conversation). There were a lot of variations on a theme, but mostly they all wanted someone to take care of them. The idiosyncratic part was the matchmaking, the fit and feel of who they would want around them - in their homes or sitting right outside their office.
That's the part that I am best at. I can do all the rest, but offering bespoke assistance in the form of people and advice. Maybe this is what my new company does... Seeger Enterprises? It's motto (or mission): Do Good. Be Better. (DGBB Enterprises?) Offering Consulting and Coaching, Bespoke Search, and Project Management and Development.
"It might be nice, it might be nice..."
* It was not news to me, but I was surprised in May 2008 to receive an object lesson in the truism, "Nothing is permanent," when I was let go for the first (but far from last!) time by MPS..
** Among the strangest phenomena of working at MPS is that fact that every 4 years (2008, 2012, 2016 & now 2020) I was fired from my post. In 2008, it felt fairly arbitrary (in fact wasn't!), but by 2012 and thereafter, I have come to realize, my penchant for speaking my mind, even when it is outside the norms for the room, was not well received by leadership. My skeptical mind was in fact the greatest strength of my tenure, because it was precisely counterpoint to leadership's tendency toward mythological thinking, but it was rarely well received, despite its proven effectiveness.
