On not knowing what happens next 🙈

This Friday January the 21st, my current company announced layoffs. This is not the first time I am part of layoffs. When I joined Goldman Sachs in 2008 as a full time employee, little did we know that two weeks later Lehman Brothers would file for chapter 11. Only a short couple of months later, more than 2 out of 10 of our colleague had been let go from company.

I am an eternal optimist. Truly. My brain, for some reason not known to me, is wired to blank out challenges and negative consequences. Maybe at some point in the future I’ll find out why. When I walked the floor at GS back in the day after the layoffs were done, a feeling crept in which reminded me that this was more than an article I read somewhere. This was real. This was not mechanical. This was a deeply human event. And when humans are affected, we ought to feel different. As I walked over a now empty floor, where just a week prior the hustle and bussle of derivative trading happened, a chill ran down my spine. A good reminder that we are connected as human beings. We suffer together, we love together, we cry together.

Now, 15 years later, at Google as a senior PM, leading teams and determining which work ‘has value’ and ‘impact’, I am looking at things differently. The naivety of my first years of my career has made space for a bit more humbleness. Work, life, relationships are incredibly complex. We are owed nothing. Everything will be a struggle. No reward might be given but the experience. If we get more, we are the luckiest people on earth. And boy were we lucky. We were so lucky that we thought we are owed. But in reality, we are not. We had a brief moment in the sun, free from the tentacles of most struggles, free from the challenges most people on the planet feel constantly, spiraled upward by the magic forces of a world-altering invention (search technology, the internet), which was conceived by some of the hardest working individuals and perfected by so many bright colleagues. And the brightness of this was so strong, made us feel so warm, that for a brief moment we forgot that just because your face glows from the rays of success it reflects, it doesn’t mean you can create sunlight.

In 2015 I discovered this the hard way. My product at Google, the place where no wrong could be done, was turned down. My management, the folks I trusted to be ‘infallible’, had to abandon their posts. The ‘family’ I got to know, the folks I knew as ‘the smartes people on the planet’, had to look at the results of their actions and declare a product fatality. It didn’t compute. It didn’t compile for me. How could this be? There was trauma. There was a feeling of free-fall. There was free-fall. I was so ashamed. The stories I told of future success, the ideas of all that we could do, the potential, should it all have been in vain?

I ran to another team, trying to shake my ‘failure’. Cover up my shame. During that time I processed long and hard what would come next for me. The change came when, after weeks of deliberation, I decided to call an external partner we had closely worked with. Privately. Not ‘in the name of my company’, but as Stefan. And I said that I was sorry. It took all I had to not tear up on that call. To not let shame take over. The reaction was all I could have hoped for. It was balanced, sincere, and measured. It was adequate for the professional nature of what we call a workplace. The partner said: “Thanks for reaching out, but just that you know, no one here things thinks this is your fault. This was a Beta product, and we know that these things can happen with a Beta product.” It was such a relief, such a lesson, such a trial for me. Call me emotional, but it was a lesson I needed to receive: things feel different, and they feel different when characterized differently. And we can affect that characterization, so that we feel differently about what happens to us.

From that day forth, a different characterization took place in my head. We were not reckless. We took measured risks. I pushed for a Beta label on the product to avoid wrong market perception. It ultimately helped preserving our integrity in the eyes of our partners and customers. We put a shutdown proposal together when it became clear we wouldn’t be able to unlock the core value propositions we had set out to conquer. A proactive step of leadership.

When my management said my performance rating dropped because ‘I wasn’t enthusiastic enough during the shutdown’, I decided to discount this at 100%. No one in the right place of mind cared about my enthusiasm. They cared that I showed that I am willing to speak the truth as I see it when it is time to do so. That is what I decide to remember from this moment Today.

That is how I characterize these events to myself: speaking the truth matters, integrity matters, actions matter. Above all, relationships & people matter.

I don’t know what will happen next. I don’t know whether there will be more layoffs. Heck, I don’t even know whether I’ll have a job in a couple of months. But what I do know is that I’ll be able to look back and look myself in the mirror and say that I did the best I could. And that will be enough to move on, whatever happens.

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