I am definitely in a moment of time that I am meant to observe. Its significance is clear, but the lesson is not so much.
I’ve felt this ending of a chapter coming for a while and I worked very hard to get to the space I am in at this moment going into parenthood. I felt the lessons over the past months and saw how they were helping me prepare to parent and heighten my career to spread my influence.
Everything was going impressively well. I saw how everything was moving into place. However, recently there was a significant amount of things popping up to make this ending of a chapter a little bit more of a cliffhanger. I needed to see these challenges and my resilience to the ebbs and flows of life needed to be strained to an extreme so that I could reflect. However, right now my identity feels at stake, and more importantly the challenge to my belief that one person can make a difference.
So what is going on exactly? My ER visit a few months back is hitting me with more costs and requiring me to manage and facilitate calls more than I would like. My car got backed into. My lead team member quit. My mom is trapped in Asheville with no power and no food, and we cannot contact her. At least she is with her sisters, but I hope she has water.
Losing my team member has been on my mind most today because (well it just happened) of all the complaining from the younger individuals this week. I know I fooled myself into believing that I could help level out the perception of culture if I had 1:1s with my team and made things transparent and visible to them how management works. This is a wake-up call that people don’t care to understand. People are takers and do not want to think beyond that. But then how do you create a world where people are happy even if they do not get what they want? Is it possible?
What do I become if I do not believe I can help people’s path and challenge people to grow through shifted perceptions? I guess I saw myself as a drop in the ocean that rippled across people on my team and spread to others. But I suppose what is one drop in an ocean? Or maybe my drop is not as strong as the others that oppose my points and perspectives.
I keep being told that no one is happy. Were they ever happy? I know it’s a game of percentages. It’s too much of a spectrum. No, the engineers weren’t happy when I was a designer, but was the culture better? Tenure was higher, so there were more benefits maybe? We used to get money for our anniversaries, now we get a catalog. The shifts in salary when the pandemic hit have caused people to recognize that they can get paid significantly more elsewhere. I suppose that is a big one. There is part of me that wonders if a recession could make a culture better, I think it could only impact that pay gap issue. I suppose some of the changes, such as what happened with levels on the engineering team were always meant to help the people that come in next.
It is hard to see this particular loss as just a piece in the overall battle. But I suppose I needed to be challenged, I need to be willing to push on Lok. After all, a quote from the One Minute Manager Meets the Monkey that I flipped to was ‘If a person always agrees with their manager, then one of them is redundant’. So if I take my next step, I need to be willing to push for the things I believe in. But what is that? I see now, that career enrichment isn’t going to fully work. The concept is right, but it’s missing something. Maybe the new recognition program can help.
