A mildly maniacal moment (not me)

What is the craziest thing that you have ever seen in the boardroom? I once witnessed the beginnings of a fist fight between two senior people in my company.

I am going to sanitize this story a little to protect some identities. It occurred on a program I was running, but in this situation, I was the lowest ranked person in the room.

This was at a client site, and late in the day, and our team was working to finish up some of the last details between us on the front lines and those back at HQ. The topic of conversation was innocuous, and I don’t remember the conversation as being anything other than routine. There was some back and forth between the room and the polycon around how to address some statement.

One of the gents in the room had made a spirited statement about what we should do. It seemed that the team was in agreement in theory, but it didn’t have to be solved right then. While we worked to close out the call, this person’s positioning became more and more aggressive. In the interest of time, a member of the sales team, and part of my immediate support for the program, leaned over the table during a break in the conversation, bade goodbye to the HQ team, and ended the call, politely.

Across the table, I watched a full grown, charismatic man go red as if he was flash seared in a Nordic sauna. He sprung from his chair, and clumsily but quickly pulled the empty chair away to his left in an effort to make it around the ovoid conference table. Shock at what was unfolding took a few seconds to settle in.

He made his way around the table in seconds, and faced off with the slender frame of a man half his size, and just a few inches taller. I was expecting the clenched fists and stiff arched arms and puffed chest posture to begin animating into haymakers and orangutan-like strikes, akin to the primitive scenes in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Thankfully, the blows never came. One of the two VPs in the room were able to step in and help squelch this event. There was no team dinner that evening, and certainly nothing was said to the client. We kept this event internal. I felt that this would be a good thing to remember for later; we are all human, we have different triggers and buttons, and through the work, while we have to keep professional, sometimes we can get a little emotional.

I distinctly remember thinking about it while traversing ATL to get to another flight, just as HR reached out to get my accounting of the event.

Looks down at vibrating iPhone. Heavy sigh. Answer. “Hi, this is Steve. I bet I know why you’re calling.”