Trial by Fire: Facing a Teachers’ Angry Mob

Spread the love, folks—except when you’re stepping into a hornets’ nest in Chiapas, Mexico, and the welcome party’s a mob of pissed-off teachers waving signs like they’re ready to storm the gates. My second week at a construction gig way back, I wasn’t sipping coffee in peace—I was dodging verbal Molotovs from a teachers’ union ready to camp out indefinitely. Their homes, built by my predecessors, were cracking like bad jokes—neighbors waving at each other through the gaps, all on live TV courtesy of Chiapas’s top morning show. Trial by fire? Nah, this was trial by inferno.

The old Director? A lying, corrupt lady who’d turned trust into a ghost town. Staff wouldn’t give me the time of day, let alone straight answers. Day one, I walked into a swamp of deception—sales and accounting hiding data like it was pirate gold. I interviewed every leader that week, no BS allowed.

Took a few to crack beers, broke the ice. By Friday, I fired two rotten apples who thought “no info” was a strategy—sales and accounting got the axe. Trust’s the bottleneck, folks—learned that early, not my first dance.

Then came the mob. Teachers demanded new homes or their money back—yesterday. Impossible, sure, but they threatened to park their protest outside our office ‘til the end of time. I invited their leaders in, poured some lukewarm refreshments, and made a promise that’d make most CEOs sweat: a deep study of their cracked-home mess, solutions in weeks. Bold? Hell yes. Backed by enough scars to know better? You bet.

Why’d they buy it? I told ‘em straight: “I’m not that last lady. She screwed you—your only shot’s trusting me now.” That day, I dragged my building crew to the site—foundations were a disaster, a literal crack-up. Quality was bleeding throughput—cash collected, not hours worked, is what counts, says Theory of Constraints. The mob didn’t care about my TOC playbook, but I did—still do, as a fractional COO unclogging cash pipes.

Week one was about slicing through the lies—staff, mob, all of it. Fired the liars, faced the rage, set the tone. It wasn’t just cracked homes; it was cracked trust. I wasn’t some rookie—I’d tangled with chaos before. You don’t fix that with hugs—you fix it with results.

Stay tuned—Chiapas didn’t break me, it sharpened me.