Coming Full Circle on the Bumpy Road to My Biggest Success
Well, the strangest thing happened. First, I should provide some context. I’m in the sprint to the finish for “Show Your Work: Successful Women Share the Bumpy Roads to Their Biggest Wins,” which is publishing April 11. The writing has been done for a while, but I’m now editing the book, along with two other very talented folks. The last four weeks have been about editing and polishing and editing and refining and just getting everything ready for the debut. I am so excited to share these stories! Truly, we have some remarkable women drawing the curtain back on some of their greatest obstacles to success. They are not all easy to read, but damn, these are some brave stories! I am honored to be part of this book, not only to contribute a chapter to it, but to have had a hand in shaping these stories through the editing process has been an honor. Truly. If you are interested in learning more, please check out my website and consider signing up for updates.
My story, unlike many (most?) of the others, is a bit … um, meander-y? Okay, that’s not a word, but it describes both my chapter and the bumpy roads to my biggest success, which is the theme of the book. My success, by the way, is very much still in progress, and that might be more of a reflection of how I’ve been hard-wired to not always recognize my success, which I discuss in the book. But I am working on eliminating that limiting belief, and I am … digressing.
One of the bumps along my road was my last job. Of course, it didn’t start out that way. I had been personally recruited by the CEO for my role and thought I would be building a content marketing strategy for his EdTech startup. Along the way, I was promoted after my boss got fired and very quickly took on much greater responsibility within the company. When I left last summer, which I write about in “Show Your Work,” it felt like it was the end of my marketing career. I had so many questions, so much uncertainty, and so much shame around my decision. But now I know that so many good things came from that decision—including my decision to heal my relationship with food—that I can only now see it as a positive.
Fast forward to this week when I met one of my former fellow directors for coffee. She had reached out a few weeks prior and wanted to get together when she was back in the states (with the company being fully remote, she and her husband had decided to spend six months in New Zealand before her son began kindergarten). She and I had worked together on a major initiative, each bringing complementary skills that paired well. She was brilliant, able to take really complex processes, boil them down into cohesive parts, and then explain them to others in a way that makes sense. She was a visionary in this way, but also a thoughtful leader. I remember her as someone who cared deeply about the company and its mission, but also its people, especially her own. She guarded and nurtured her team. She was one of the few people who could disagree with the CEO and get away with it, and that’s mostly because of all of the attributes I outlined above. I had so much respect for her, and as someone who had been with the company longer than most, I looked to her for guidance in navigating tricky situations.
While I had really enjoyed working with her, I wasn’t sure why she had invited me to coffee. We hadn’t stayed in contact after I left. For one, she was getting ready for this grand adventure across the globe with her husband and 4-year-old. Plus, when our initiative was over, she was happy to be returning to the area of the business she was most passionate about and pouring all of her energy into it. When she reached out, I figured it was to reconnect now that she was back. Possibly it was to ask questions about what had prompted me to leave or to seek advice about a situation with the new leadership. It was a stretch, but I even thought perhaps she was having coffee on behalf of the CEO. She was one of the few people he truly seemed to respect, so it wasn’t out of the question. I really had no idea.
But we met, and I was glad to see a friendly face from the company I had exited with so many mixed emotions. We exchanged the usual catching up pleasantries. She asked about my work, and I talked about the book project, my editing and marketing work, and how much I truly love what I’m doing now. We talked about New Zealand, and she mentioned how this could be a potential place for them to live—if they needed to—one day. That statement was odd, but I let it slide because I was really interested in what was going on at my old workplace. I knew there had been one firing since I had left, and I suspected there had been more. When I asked her how everything was going, she was matter of fact.
“I don’t know how everything is, because I got fired two months ago,” she said. My jaw fell to the floor. I actually asked for clarification twice, I was so in shock. I still am. Here was someone so integral to the company—she had literally built the company’s product along with the head of engineering—and was not only respected but well-liked by peers, her people, and basically everyone within the company. Well, I guess almost everyone. When I left, she was one of the few people who could, and would, stand up to the CEO and actually get through to him. She had been working on a new project at his behest, and just a few weeks prior to being fired, she had been flown from New Zealand to Dallas for the leadership meeting. But how things change. She had had no warning—well, no recent warning. Right before I had left, the CEO had brought in a childhood friend to help run the company, and the two of them, along with a college buddy who was serving as the company’s chief of staff, had formed their own team outside of the existing leadership team, of which she and I were both a part of. When she had questioned some changes being made, she had been told her she needed to stay in her lane.
While I was floored, my husband said it shouldn’t have been a surprise. She had challenged the CEO too much, he said, and with the company struggling, that made her a target.
In our current climate of tech downsizing, it seems like these kinds of shake-ups happen all the time. At the major companies, they become fodder for gossip that spreads like wildfire. Respectable (and less respectable) publications devote entire articles to dissecting what went wrong. But for a company of just a few dozen employees, there is no fanfare. After the initial incident, it’s largely back to business. There’s a kind of head-in-the-sand mentality, which I’ve never understood, that seems to take hold among those who remain.
She was gutted. Her confidence was shaken, at least initially. How could it not? My confidence had been good and rattled when I left too. But she was the smartest woman in the company, and losing someone with this level of institutional knowledge and understanding of how all the pieces fit together would be a major loss.
When the smartest woman in the company isn’t safe, what hope is there for the rest of us?
By the way, she is going to be fine. She has already had some solid interviews. She is incredibly intelligent and gifted in her areas of expertise, which are increasingly in demand, so she will land on her feet. But she is also heavily leaning toward starting her own venture. I hope she does.
Her firing was the ultimate confirmation that I made the right decision. I had long made peace with my situation, and that “bump” was one of several that led to where I am right now, loving what I’m doing.