Real Life Breaks In
I wrote the first few articles in this blog long before I published any of them to the Internet. I've been sitting on them for a couple of months now, trying to figure out how to write this post. In addition to the typical professional things I covered in my initial articles, each of my first three jobs included experiences on how real life intrudes on our work environment that have had a profound impact on how I view work and life. I want to share those. (I'm using coworkers' names, but not their real names, in this post.)
I started my first post-university job at ANSYS in the direct aftermath of 9/11 and the financial crisis of 2001. ANSYS, as many companies did, chose to layoff some of their employees during this difficult time. Sharon was an executive assistant who had been with the company for many years and who was well-liked, and was among the employees who was laid off. When she was laid off, I seem to remember some surprise from most coworkers, but also an acknowledgment by some that the quality of her work had seemed to slip recently. After she was laid off, and with the end of her medical benefits looming, she took the time to schedule an appointment with a doctor to talk about some headaches which had been bothering her. As you might guess, she was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer. The company learned of this, and extended Sharon's benefits so she could get treatment, but if I remember correctly, ultimately she passed away not long after.
At CTI, I sat in a cubicle next to Steve, one of our sales reps. One afternoon around 3:00, I heard Steven's phone ring. He picked it up, and I overheard part of his conversation.
"She's not there? She should be there. I'm really sorry; I'll come pick up John right away. No. Thank you for calling; I'm sorry for the inconvenience. I'll be about half an hour."
On his way out the door, Steve let me know that was his older kid's school, and that his wife hadn't shown up at her regular time to pick him up. He expected she would be there any minute, but was going to go to pick him up just in case. He expected to be back after confirming everybody was at home. Steve didn't come back. When I got to work the next day, I learned that his wife had rolled her car in an accident on her way to the school. Their toddler had dropped a toy from the car seat, and she had unbuckled her seatbelt to reach the toy and hand it back. When the car rolled, she was thrown from the vehicle and died. (The toddler, secure in their car seat, survived.)
Not too long after I started working at Webmedx, the company went through some "restructuring" (i.e. layoffs) in efforts to cut costs and become profitable. The company accountant, Kyle, even though he wasn't being laid off himself, took the news very badly. After our leadership announced the layoffs in the office, Kyle became very agitated, yelled at everybody and left the office. Either later that day or the next morning, they told us they had decided to let Kyle go, too, due to the outburst and his unwillingness to cooperate on finding a path forward. Maybe another day or two passed after that, and I came into the office and was met with upset coworkers and another tragic announcement. The news that morning reported that Kyle had driven his car into the Allegheny River, and rescuers were unable to save him.
1: Lessons I'm Still Learning
At this point in my career, I was trying to maintain a strong separation between my work and personal life. (Whether that is good or not may be a topic for a future post.) Somehow, until these experiences, I hadn't really considered that all of my coworkers may have been attempting a similar dance. When a coworker is going through a crisis, as happened with Steve at CTI, sometimes you learn about those as they do, but how many of us know our coworkers well enough to know, not just what they are going through now, but what they have gone through in the past? Do we think of them first and foremost as coworkers, or do we see them as fellow humans walking the same roads as we do? It is so easy to allow our relationships with coworkers to become transactional. Will this person be helpful to me in meeting my goals, or might they be a hindrance? In more recent careers, I've found that removing some of my own protective barriers around my personal life has allowed me to build better and more meaningful relationships with coworkers, and that makes the work infinitely more enjoyable.
I want to emphasize that I am not aware of any actions that human leaders took in relation to these deaths that gave me any concern. To the contrary, my memories are that they worked to provide support to my coworkers and their families as best as they could. At the same time, I saw that in every case, for the most part, all of us put on our happy faces and kept doing exactly what we would have been doing if these coworkers hadn't just gone through unspeakable tragedy. There were still deadlines to meet, products to launch, and customers to support. Increasingly as I reflect on these and other experiences, I see that corporations are distinct entities from the humans who create them, invest in them, lead them, and work for them, and all of our actions are shaped by a complex symbiosis with what we have created. I'm not saying, by the way, that corporations are inherently evil — or good — they are just not human.