22

BREAK THE CEILING OR BREAK OUT

After you decided to stay in your team lead role and set your sights on the next rung, the discontent that was plaguing you largely dissipated. You realize that spending so much time on that decision was keeping you from appreciating the great aspects of your job: you have a flexible (albeit time-consuming) schedule, a great team, and you’re working on really interesting problems, even if you’re not exactly changing the world.

Once you really focus on the work ahead of you, you start to have some ideas about how to scale the work your team is doing. You see that you could combine a few of the teams at your company to provide an end-to-end platform for financial management and that this initiative could massively increase revenue at your company over the next few years.

You bring the idea to your manager, Paul, and you are surprised by his unenthusiastic response. He has always seemed supportive of the work you are doing, but this is the first time you’ve brought a big idea to him that would change the strategy of your business. He tells you that it’s a nice idea, but that the company isn’t really set up to try something like that. Your confidence wavers.

A few weeks later, you get an email that makes your stomach churn. The VP of your division sends an org-wide note congratulating your boss on his innovative idea for restructuring your department to create better end-to-end financial tools for your customers. It’s your idea, to a T.

You take the rest of the day off and sit on your couch rage-crying and eating french fries dipped in a chocolate milkshake while texting with your friend Simone about what happened. With puffy eyes and feeling vaguely sick to your stomach, you decide you have nothing to lose by confronting Paul.

In his office the next day, Paul looks you straight in the eye and tells you that it wasn’t your idea; it was something he had been working on for months. You find that doubtful based on his initial reaction when you pitched the strategy to him.

You’re tempted to go to his boss, the VP of your department, and let him know that this was your idea. Not purely out of vengeance, but because you believe that you would be a better person to execute it. If you could show your VP the whole strategy that you’ve been working on, maybe he would realize that you are the right person to lead the company in this new direction. But if you go to your VP and he doesn’t decide to give you the opportunity, you’ll just be stuck with a manager who is both conniving and mad at you for going over him.

You are equally tempted to just run and start over in that journalism career you have fantasized about. Why stick around and deal with dynamics like this again and again? They seem to loom ahead, blocking your way to the glass ceiling you have always heard about and are just now beginning to understand.

The part of you that is excited to run with your vision and take your company to the next level wants to stick around to do just that. The feminist in you wants to stick around too, if only to show guys like Paul that they can’t get ahead with these antics. You know that only 6.4 percent of Fortune 500 companies are run by women, and you want to be part of the force that changes that.¹

The jilted part of you wants to escape from this corrupt system now, while you still have your optimism somewhat intact.

If you decide to go to your VP and make a case for why your manager shouldn’t be trusted and why you would be the right person to lead the strategy that you came up with, go to Chapter 32.

If you decide that this corporate dynamic isn’t for you after all and decide to try to start over in a journalism career, go to Chapter 23.