when it’s not about money
A couple years before I finally quit my job, I felt a total lack of creativity or control in my day to day. I had started out my career in Supply Chain Management/Operations doing “direct operations” meaning overseeing things related to actual manufacturing of products. While this carried with it a tangible satisfaction of launching products that consumers and myself would use, the work itself became very executional and routine after several years. So I switched into doing more "strategy and operations” which meant I focused on longer term planning. Bigger but more ambiguous projects like “what capabilities do we need over the next 3-5 years to hit our business goals?”
The problem with this is that although it sounds important (because it is) large corporations realistically don’t have the attention span or the conviction to stay the course on long term plans. Usually what happens is you spend about 6 months coming up with the plan for the next few years and getting all the buy-in from the leadership team who can never really agree on anything because it’s more about who will end up with more power. Then a major organization change happens, a new leader gets put in power, they have their own ideas, you spend another 6 months coming up with the plan around their ideas and then another org change happens. And then round and round you go until you die.
Whether it’s intentional or not, the result is any strategies proposed and even those agreed upon, become totally moot. This also means that the person proposing the strategies (aka me) gets penalized for “not delivering” when the people creating the whiplash are the ones deciding performance ratings. In the wise words of Admiral Ackbar in Star Wars, “IT’S A TRAP.”
After years of feeling like my job was absolutely pointless, but being told I was “doing great, just needed another cycle to show results to get promoted to the next level” I started to feel like I was taking crazy pills. Leadership wouldn’t promote me, but they kept giving me raises to make up for it, so I stayed. The golden handcuffs began to tighten.
Then inevitably I hit a cliff when it came to compensation because I was so far out of my pay band, with no real chance of getting promoted. Therefore any smart person would see there was no longer any incentive for going “above and beyond.” So instead of listening to the words coming out of their mouths, I started listening to their actions and how I was actually being treated.
Around this time I decided to start some personal creative projects to counteract my growing sense of ennui. One of which was learning how to produce podcasts and starting Double Cuzzies with my double cousin (obvi) and another was turning my blog about television into the EMDB TV podcast. This was the first time I actually put something out in the world that wasn’t related to my 9 to 5 job. It felt nice, it felt kinda scary, it felt freeing.
I enjoyed doing things with more autonomy, but I was also longing to put my operations skills for better use since I thought I was maybe actually kind of good at my job, just not in the right place to appreciate them. Then the universe dropped an email in my inbox from a group I had been a fan of for awhile.
Slant’d started out as a passion project amongst friends who saw a lack of authentic AAPI storytelling. I got introduced to them when the founder did a panel talk at Google during AAPI history month and started following them. Just when I was at my wit’s end with work, I saw an email in my personal inbox with the subject: “Slant’d is hiring for an Operations Whiz.”
I applied immediately.
Even from the interview process, I knew this group was different. It’s 100% volunteer, remote, async, and all AAPIs. One of the questions I got took me aback. It went like this, “Given this is a group of high achieving AAPIs, we find that we often take on more than we should and struggle to ask for help. What are some ways you would work to maintain balance, identify when we are over capacity, and respond when it’s clear someone is not delivering due to taking on too much?”
I paused to take in this breath of fresh air. Here was a group so self aware of their own cultural nuance and the American tendency to err towards constant productivity. Here was a group who was consciously trying to build something better. I had found my people. And if I was lucky enough to get hired, I would do anything I could to move their mission forward. For free.
Fast forward, it’s been almost a year since I started volunteering at Slant’d and everyday has been inspiring and empowering. I’ve also gotten to use those operations skills I knew I had been honing for over a decade and finally get appreciated for them. The same skills I knew deep down were strong, and useful, if not fully recognized elsewhere. It gave me the confidence to leave my 9-5 job, knowing that I’d be okay. Knowing that I wasn’t the problem, but also that I was worth more to this world than just what I could produce.
And that sense of appreciation, of humanity, of being valued for all that I am, is something money can’t buy. But it’s also something that costs nothing to give. And I hope more organizations can see that one day.
Happy Friday friends,
em
