Back to work. Back to XYZ. (November 2013)
After two months on the job, my two bosses got cold feet and didn’t want to sign off on the changes I advocated. My proposals would mash up a lots of toes (change reporting lines, push a new work culture, require us to find some people new jobs, expose poor management oversight, etc). My bosses lost their bluster from a few months back and instead wanted me to draft a softer change process to span a two- to three-year timeframe.
That wasn’t, however, what we had agreed to during the hiring process, to operate at a snail’s pace, sweeping the problems under the corporate rug. We had originally agreed to a process of 6 to 12 months.
I decided, the hell with it. I’ll just try to ram the changes through. I was after all an executive Vice President with secretary and all the trimmings. What’s the point of having VP powers if I didn’t use them? If I was going to fail, I wanted to fail fast. I’d either break through the crust of corporate culture or I would get fired and could move on.
They fired me. Actually, we signed a contract a few weeks later which “dissolved our working agreement in mutual understanding”.
Now there are many, many people in the world, but relatively few with whom we interact, and even fewer who cause us problems. So when you come across such a chance for practicing patience and tolerance, you should treat it with gratitude. It is rare. Just as having unexpectedly found a treasure in your own house, you should be happy and grateful toward your enemy for providing you that precious opportunity. – Dalai Lama XIV
The 101% honest truth is that I wasn’t angry about the dismissal. I didn’t get mad. I didn’t throw away their emails or telephone numbers. I even told Mr. CTO as he escorted me out the door, “No hard feelings”.
Yes, I was super exhausted, disappointed in the people I had believed in, but I wasn’t bitter. I gave it my best. More important to me was that I stayed true to myself and my values. If they didn’t want that in their organization, then not working together was best for all of us. They could find someone better suit-ed to their goals and I could get back to traveling.
The real me was out. Out of a job… but free to explore again. That’s the positive part.
The negative side of the story was that my soul had been almost totally soured, stripped back to the cold, old days when I was slaving in Berlin. Over the 82 days I worked at XYZ, I gradually but almost totally lost sight of my North Cape goals.
One expression of this was that I stopped writing in my gratitude journal. Back in France, during the month of August 2013, I had 24 “grateful” entries. However, for my first month of work (September) there were only 16 entries. In October I was down to 14. In November, my last month working at XYZ, there was only …one!
By the end of my time at XYZ, I was working 80 hours a week (even more than in Berlin). I’d stopped practicing mindfulness, meditating, enjoying every flavor of every bite of each meal. I didn’t put people before work.
Perhaps this description is a little black and white, a little hard. I did go to the movies and visit a very good friend in Rotterdam. Furthermore, I did take the actions at my job, fully consciously of the fact that it was in my own best interest (love me first, live my values).
I guess a better way of looking at things would be thusly: Leaving my Berlin job and cycling to the North Cape was “two steps forward”. Working at XYZ was “one step back”.
How about I start with the first few minutes of day one. I arrive as planned at 9:30. My boss, Mr. CTO is in a meeting so his secretary shows me to my new office. Imagine my surprise when she takes me up one floor and says “Mr. CTO thought you could share the office with your predecessor, Hans”.
WTF? Hans was the guy I was hired to replace. He had been told only two weeks before that I was replacing him. He was mad as hell about the whole thing and threatened to sue the company if demoted. He was three years away from retirement and a “lifer”, meaning he had spent his entire life working at this one single company. Now I was asked on my first day to share an office with him. Things could only get better, right?
Turns out Hans himself had a predecessor in the company, “Willem”. Five years before when Hans took over the Vice President job, Willem had also made a huge ruckus. So in typical corporate fashion, both Hans and Willem kept their “Vice President” titles. They worked in separate buildings, used the same people but never directly coordinated together because of their rivalry.
Wait, wait… There’s more!
One week after I started, Mr. CTO was demoted. That is called, in corporate speak, being “restructured”. Until then Mr. CTO had reported directly to the CEO. Now, Mr. CTO had been kicked out of the inner circle. Anything he now suggested or requested to be done would be treated in the same corporate manner as other non-inner circle executives. It would be stuck in the freezer to die a long, cold death. Because I reported to Mr. CTO, this now meant that anything I wanted to change in the department would also be stuck in this deep freeze pipeline.
Did I mention the creative accounting? After weeks of collecting data from sources other than my own team, because they wouldn’t or couldn’t give out the figures, I discovered some “irregularities”. My department was in an even much worse financial position than management had feared.
Just a few days in, I realized I was in a big fu<king mess.
OXLAEY