A few years ago, I gave up my small business to take my dream job.

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It was hell. 🤦‍♀️

OMG I landed my dream job!

When you operate your own advisory practice (like me), you end up spending half your time serving your clients, and the other half filling up your pipeline with new clients.

And if you don’t like sales (also like me), this kinda sucks. 🤷

I was burned out from the relentless hamster wheel.

I just wanted to do the work that I knew I was good at.

So when one of my favorite clients asked me to join their team full time, it was hard to say no.

While accepting this job meant exchanging the freedom of owning my own business for being a corporate cog, it was the kind of opportunity that made that sacrifice worthwhile.

In fact, when they initially contacted me about the project I was advising on, I was the most elated I had ever been in my career—

Because it was the redevelopment of the iconic plaza at Rockefeller Center. 🤯

After being my client for nearly a year, they were offering me my dream job. 

You can’t beat that kind of validation.

But not long after hanging up my entrepreneur hat, I learned that my new employer valued:

1. Fire drills over function

2. Politics over productivity

3. Memos over mentorship

My dream job quickly turned into a nightmare. I was gutted.

1. Fire drills over function

What’s a fire drill in a business sense?

It happens when everyone drops everything they’re doing to work on some big important project that never goes anywhere.

The boss needs it done yesterday. 

The urgency is palpable. 

You’re crunching numbers until midnight every day for a week.

Meanwhile, your regular functions are being ignored, or unfairly dumped on your team.

But it doesn’t matter because what you’re doing is so pivotal, it’s going to change the future of the company. Or maybe even the course of history.

F*ck, this project may enable us to go back in time and stop the Kennedy assassination. 

It’s that important.

Except it’s… not.

Instead, it’s things like:

👉 Tying up an already overwhelmed marketing department for months because the CEO is convinced that an owl that was found in the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree is going to be the next “Eloise at the Plaza”.

👉 Or forcing the asset management team to develop a hopeless operating bid on a city-owned project with the most laughable terms in the history of partnerships.

2. Politics over productivity

One thing I’ve proudly become known for throughout my career is my ability to simply get shit done.

So I was stunned when my direct manager (who I truly believe was trying to do right by me with this advice) encouraged me to prioritize tasks that would be seen by the upward chain of command, regardless of their relevance to, ya know, getting shit done.

If that wasn’t the culture of this company in a nutshell, I don’t know what was.

With days that were jam-packed with meetings, the in-between time wasn’t spent working on our jobs — it was spent working on how to look good in the next meeting.

That left few precious hours for accomplishing actual work.

So what happens when nobody has time to do any real work? 👇️

🐌Change initiatives move forward at a snail’s pace (if at all).

⛷️ The responsibility for productivity flows downhill, placing undue pressure on the front-line team.

🙄The people who get promoted may not be those who are good at their jobs — but they’re definitely the ones who are good at looking good.

I did the best I could to balance the need to get shit done with the need to play politics, and I definitely “got noticed” (more on that next), but at what cost to my team and the line of business I was responsible for?

The world may never know. 🤷‍♀️

3. Memos over mentorship

I was excited when my boss’s boss wanted to mentor me.

Turns out, she wasn’t exactly… how should I put this… human?

To this day, I’m convinced that she’s a top-secret political AI test project, prompted to maintain plausible deniability at all costs. 🤖

For our mentorship meeting, she invited me into her office (overlooking 5th Avenue and the St. Patrick’s Cathedral), and proceeded to red-pen a memo I had recently sent… while I watched.

They were mainly basic edits, like “move this heading here”, and “get rid of the table of contents” — because upward mobility in this company was clearly determined by whether or not your memos have page numbers. 🙄

My “mentorship meeting” could’ve been an email. 🤦‍♀️

But I must have impressed her, because she proceeded to give me a ton of extra responsibility — without a new title or more pay.

You know, the kind of responsibility where you’re put in charge of people, but the people you’re now in charge of aren’t told that you’re now in charge of them.

The day after I submitted my resignation notice, she called me into her office. I was prepared to tell her exactly why I had quit.

This was the exact conversation:

She didn’t ask a single question, or open the door to a conversation. 

Instead, she masterfully manipulated the exchange by making statements that were technically true — which forced me to agree.

After that, she could truthfully tell anyone who asked, “I spoke to Kristin, she’s leaving because she got a great opportunity, and we couldn’t convince her to stay.”

But I guess it’s better than what happened to one member of my team who quit shortly after I did…

Knowing how she had manipulated my conversation, he didn’t hold back, and laid out all of the unsavory reasons he was choosing to leave the company, concluding with:

“For my own mental health, I cannot tolerate it here any longer.”

Bingo.

She turned around and told everyone he was leaving for “mental health reasons.”

That one was pretty diabolical. It still pisses me off. 😡

So what’s the lesson here?

Accomplishments are great.

Bragging rights rock.

Meaningful work drives us forward.

But no matter how important the work is, if the people suck, then the culture sucks.

And if the culture sucks, you’ll be miserable at work every day.

Sure, it feels amazing to be the steward of a 100-year-old icon, planning its resilience for the next 100 years, all while surrounded by celebrities.

Hell, I danced with Bill Murray at his 70th birthday party. 🕺

But that excitement quickly wears off, and is replaced with anxiety, confusion, and finally, the killer of all imagination and personal growth — complacency.

👉️ Don’t work at that place.

👉️ And don’t be that place to work.

Cheers! 🍻

-Kristin :-)

Thanks to tenor.com for today’s dank 30 Rock GIFs. 🙏

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