The Turning Point

I was reminiscing this morning about my job. After a series of disappointing stops along the way, I remember how much I loved my job when I first started. I was excited to find a place to use my various skills and talents and a place that valued my ideas and innovative thinking.

But I also remember the turning point, the exact moment when it changed to an unpleasant working experience. My boss, KE, was a great boss. He encouraged me, entertained my suggestions, and rewarded my successes. With him, I felt like I finally had found fertile ground to put down roots. We quickly became very close, having like-minded ideas about the direction of the team, and I truly believe that he enjoyed having a confidant and buddy in the team. And when we unexpectedly found ourselves as a single-car family, he graciously volunteered to pick me up for a carpool.

It was on one of those car rides home that KE mentioned that he was bouncing around the idea of having a co-manager to help him with the ever-growing demands of the team. We threw around some high-level ideas on the responsibilities of the role, something we often did during our rides. And then he surprised me by telling me that he was considering me for the position.

I was ecstatic and speechless. It was the culmination of all that I had desired and been working toward for years. My dream was to manage, to find a way to give back to the team and give people a better manager experience than I had had throughout my career. But I also realized that it wasn’t a done deal yet, so I tried to keep my hopes under wrap until I knew for sure. Later that night, I texted KE with some additional questions and ideas about the role, trying to imagine how I could fit into it. His response was, “I don’t think we should talk about it anymore. I shouldn’t have mentioned it to you. That was my mistake.”

In the end, the role never came to be, and I was not to live my dream of being a manager. Actually shortly after, a new person was brought on to manage the team, and KE was demoted. But it wasn’t the loss of the opportunity that stung, I’m mature enough to understand corporate politics and how fickle this world is. It was the wall that KE built between us. After that car ride, he went out of his way to separate the business from the personal. I was cut off from his inner thoughts and from the privilege of what happened behind the scenes. Without warning, I became just another contributor on the team.

We stopped carpooling, as the awkward tension grew between us. We stopped eating lunch together. We pretty much stopped talking, unless it had to do with a normal boss-peon interaction. And as the wall between us grew, I found that I had lost the one person that had believed in me, in my potential, in my ideas. I no longer had his favor or encouragement. And without that, this became just another job like any other that I had worked. A job filled with disappointment and politics. I watched undeserving person after person get promoted to leadership, while I languished underutilized and unsatisfied on the sidelines.

I sat like this, becoming more and more bitter, for three years until another chance finally presented itself. But by then, it was too late. The damage was done. I was no longer the hopeful enthusiastic person that I had been. Everything was now jaded by that one moment, that one ill-conceived response from the man that I had looked up to and respected.

I ultimately took the job of manager, because I didn’t feel there was a better option for the team. I felt like they deserved better than what they’d been experiencing for the last six months. I didn’t take it because I wanted to lead; that part was gone, broken by the machine that had once held such promise. But some small part of me still felt like I could use the opportunity to make a difference in people’s lives. And then another turning point happened at the hands of the same man.

I was struggling with a situation with a couple of my team members, and I reached out to KE for advice. He had moved on to another company months before, but we had kept in touch after he’d left. His response to my text was, “Well, you’re the one that wanted to be a manager. Welcome to leadership.” Instead of taking the opportunity to mentor and guide me, instead of making amends for the hurtful way he’d handled that moment so many years ago, he took one more opportunity to jam the knife through my barely-beating heart. And with that stroke, he severed the last cord that bound us. I haven’t really talked to him since.

And my tenure as the manager of this team has been bad ever since. I regret the decision to take the job. I loathe going to work every day. I don’t feel respected by the team or the organization. And in three years, I haven’t been able to accomplish a single idea or goal. My time as the leader has been unremarkable and forgettable.

This is not what I imagined it would be like so many years ago, when I was a bright-eyed and naive consultant, yearning for a chance to make a mark on this world. It has been eight and a half years of walking down a gravel road barefoot, while a crowd of people, lining both sides of the road, have pelted me with rocks and garbage. And I can’t help but wonder if all of it might have turned out differently if one man had chosen a different response to my text.