On Failure

I wrote a long journal entry yesterday about my feelings being laid off from Nordstrom. It was fueled by a LinkedIn post related to the mass tech layoffs that occurred recently particularly the ones by Twitter and Meta, in which the author said, If you've been laid-off, realize that is a failure of the company you were working for, not you. It made me think of Robin Williams as the therapist in "Good Will Hunting" telling Will, "It's not your fault. It's not your fault." I must have watched that clip two-dozen times in the days following being laid off in an effort to make myself believe it wasn't my fault the way things ended there. I am just beginning now to really believe that.

Without going into the details I did in the blog post, I am realizing that what led me to being let go after almost seven years of doing the best I could do in that job, was not my fault at all. If you know me at all, you know I read a lot. (My brother argues that listening to audiobooks shouldn't count towards my book count, but he's wrong.) I read everything I can get my hands on including a lot of managerial-type books, and I had realized before that what was going on within my organization at Nordstrom contradicted so much of what I read, even those books that my vice president herself had given us to read. You can't tout radical candor, which according to the author of Radical Candor, Kim Scott, is equal parts "Challenge Directly" and "Care Personally", if you avoid any sort of direct challenge and do not care personally for those you support. In his book Drive, Daniel Pink lays out the three elements of drive, of personal motivation: autonomy, mastery, and purpose. If you give your subordinates no autonomy, no chance at any sort of mastery in their work, and provide no vision, no purpose for the work is it any wonder that they might feel disengaged from that work?

When I was let go I initially felt like the biggest failure. My self-esteem was already not good and had been further ground down by months of doing all I could to keep projects on track and keep improving while my team was slashed in half and never receiving any sort of encouragement from my superiors. I also did not have the tools for self-compassion and was not using the tools I had learned previously to help deal with the situation. That was a tough lesson for me and one I will not need to learn again.

Some company is going to give me that shot, is going to give me that autonomy, allow me opportunities and encourage me to master my skills, and provide a clear purpose for the work we do. And I'm going to do incredible things for that company and for the team I get to work with.