A lesson learnt
Wednesday, June 25th, 2008I’ve finally had to face up to the question of what path to take in life. Nobody said deciding on a path through life was easy, and I never expected it to be - but how you manage the human relationships on which your decision process depends can dramatically affect the outcome. This is a lesson recently branded upon my brain, likely very painfully: as I write, a door seem likely to be closing to me that I would have absolutely loved to take, as a result of cowardly mismanagement of one such relationship.
I’ve been faced with a short term opportunity to work with a fantastic bunch of people in a company with a great mission, with a position doing something reasonably interesting. It wouldn’t pay much, in a city that’s (in)famously expensive to live in, and the outcome is highly uncertain and might leave me in a financially unsustainable city with no job. What I’ve been trying to do is greatly reduce the risk by trying to line up a job for winter ‘09 onwards - in an industry which I think would suit me, career-wise. So it comes down to balancing the short term and the long term.
Having been offered the short term position, the long term position dragged their feet, taking their time to organise interviews, get back to me with decisions (and in fact they still haven’t, despite the matter being supposed to have found some sort of closure a week ago).
Rather than having the maturity and openness to communicate what was going on to the startup I wanted to work for over the summer, I in turn stalled them and they were left in the dark about what was going on. I had absolutely no idea what the consequences would be of admitting to a company offering me a position that I was seeking alternate offers. Partly, the issue was that I was slightly leaning towards the view that if the long term path was unwilling to give me time to work for the startup over the summer, I might, to my extreme chagrin, have to sacrifice the short term experience for the long view option.
Keeping them in the dark until I had all the options laid out before me was not a conscious strategy, but rather, a reflex equivalent to sticking my head in the sand. It was a ’strategy decision’ that was made unconsciously, played out over several weeks, as I waited for new information from the long term factor, stalling the startup at every point, thinking I was getting close to a resolution [which hasn't even arrived yet!]
In retrospect it was a cowardly and naive thing to do, completely blind to the needs and feelings of my summer employers - a startup needs to execute fast, smoothly, and with access to the fullest information potentially available to it (hence the importance of openness in all dealings with them) - and I gave them nothing but uncertainty, delays, and a feeling of being played and manipulated as I sought “alternatives” (when really I was seeking a safety net to enable me to work with them at a [reduced] level of personal risk that I could find to be workable).
Furthermore, they were hiring me for a position which demanded great communication skills with outsiders, in addition to the openness and honesty of emotion that working in a small team demands. I’ve demonstrated neither of those in the very turbulent past few weeks that followed my uprooting from a stable, 4-year stretch at university.
Unsurprisingly, they’re mighty pissed off and I’ve greatly shaken their confidence in me, and the chances that this opportunity is still open seem very remote.
Managing your options and the relationships attached to them is no simple task, especially when they each have their own resolution timelines (remember, I’m still waiting to hear back from the long term opportunity), expectations and outcomes. It’s not a simple set of simultaneous equations you can solve and find the right solution to - you often have to make a decision without all the information and options clear to you. There’s a life lesson in risk and decision right there, for sure. And neither is communicating with the people offering you the options - I’ve never known how to explain jobseeking alternatives to potential employers.
But what I’ve learnt here - potentially very painfully if the short term opportunity closes to me - is that openness and honesty would have been the best policy, daunting and impossible though it may have seemed at the time. People would have been more understanding than I feared, had I been open with them and found the right way to explain what was going on, to dispel - or at least minimise - their fears. Obscurity and stalling is the confused coward’s way out - and I fell for its lure; hopefully, if I’ve learnt my lesson, for the last time.
