New Day

Yesterday was my last day at my toxic job.

I hope you see, in reading my past posts, how I am someone who determines a path and commits to it. I'm not sure when I posted that I would not be where I am in x number of months one way or another...and I followed through on that.

I developed a 5 year plan for myself back in 2012...and I followed it...with a few bumps and diversions along the way (damn fear).

There were two pieces that were hard to leave. One was a business that I had been a board member of...I had to give up my board role a few months ago due to the overly burdened load I was carrying and how things were imploding around me. Despite that, the CEO and five of the leaders came to the office yesterday and presented me with the most poignant, thoughtful gift. It had broken my heart to give that up and the fact that they still gave me such a touching gift even after I'd quit on them had me in tears for quite a while.

The other was a department that reported to me that was an anomaly in the mass of dysfunction and incompetence. It was well run, had a thriving healthy culture within it's own walls, and we'd cultivated some wildly successful strategies that have the potential to have a national influence within this larger organization we operate under. Yesterday, we presented our five year plan relative to one of those strategies to national and the very last e-mail I sent yesterday was an introduction of the team here to the next level up in the national leadership structure that will be able to actually make it reality. I cried during that meeting and I cried typing that e-mail...it pains me that I won't be able to see that through.

But beyond that...I will miss nothing but a few of the good people. I said my good-byes to the people that mattered. I said nothing to the rest. I had a check-in with my boss, the CEO yesterday, and he literally couldn't get off the phone with me fast enough. There were no well wishes.

It's the strangest organization I've ever worked in. Instead of identifying talent and cultivating it, they load as much on to it as possible in an effort get as much out of it as they can until they break it and then they move on resentfully once they've broken it because it didn't give them MORE. This has been their attitude toward everyone of value who has left in the time I've been here. Despite the glaring imbalance in work distribution and obviously impossible expectations they place on people...they actually verbalize their disappointment and have told myself and another executive who broke at the same time that we were selfish for leaving them in such a dire state...not acknowledging that we'd been telling them for two years exactly what they needed to do to get out of it but seeing zero action taken. You can't help someone who won't help themselves.

There is a point in Atlas Shrugged where John Galt is telling the looters exactly what they need to do to get the country out of the predicament it is in but it is such a threat to their PERSONAL interests...they refuse to do it, despite expecting him to sacrifice himself for the good of society...when they themselves will not.

It's all been very Atlas Shrugged.