Tech Support Issue #5: exit strategy

Dear Tech Support,

I’m in my last couple weeks at [company redacted] because I’m going to business school in the fall. Once, when I was going through something really upsetting, I had a conversation with a mentor in our (pretty toxic) environment who advised that instead of speaking up about it then, I should just “save it for exit.” Now that exit is nigh and I have a final conversation with the head of the department on the books, I wonder how I could possibly sum up constructively the litany of things I’ve experienced and observed (I’d group most of it under the header of “woeful mismanagement”) and if it matters at all. I also wrote a 2000-word catharsis exercise-cum-farewell email that’s also definitely never going to see the light of day. 

Best, 

Disaffected Future Titan of Industry

Dear Tiny Titan,

brb dusting off my wingtips and “Junior Managers of America” sheriff’s badge because ooooh do I love a game of corporate chess. Let’s suit up and roll the dice! (is that how chess works...I only play 4D chess…with Trump himself ;). 

Just to get it out of the way, @ the advice to “save it for exit”–I hate that. So canny, so cynical (extrapolating big-time but I have no doubt this advice-giver is scarily good at “playing the game”). That your department and its leadership can only absorb their well-intentioned people pointing out workaday problems, toxic managers, bullshit artistry, etc. years outside of the heat of the moment, when accountability, action, and intervention don’t really matter anymore, because otherwise they’re going to have no choice but label YOU the problem and railroad your journey up the ranks….yeah, well, of course you feel powerless and like “what’s the point” now. That IS the point. And it tells you everything about your department’s culture that you need to know. But you already knew that. No more knowing needed, really. (There will be a short non-optional quiz at the end of this issue). 

But yeah, what’s the point of pointing it all out now? I once left a harrowing work experience quivering like a leaf, a shell of myself. This was early 2014 in Google's creative agency, Creative Lab (here I go again with the “blind items”/tea about Google...am I “enough” without them??). I didn’t have the wherewithal then to see that place & its ~systemic issues~ for what they were (it took years of comparing notes with the legion of other half-masticated people on the other side to get there; at the time I just internalized all the negative parts of the experience as my FAILURE TO ACHIEVE PERFECT CULTURE FIT™). But during my last week I did manage to document a few clear, flagrant incidents to tuck into my manager’s HR file. “His comments felt both hostile and unprofessional,” I wrote sternly to the team’s one, beleaguered HR business partner, “and FAR below the standards for management at Google that I’ve experienced over the past 6.5 years” (editor’s note: HAHAHAHHA). Imagine my smugness at putting this all to paper, the POWER I felt at my ‘scathing’ words (I’m only 75% as earnest/dumb/naive now, 6+ years later). Then imagine how STEAMED I was when he got promoted to VP like 6 months later (“but what I said about his ‘unprofessional’ management!!!” *clutches pearls*) Incredibly, when I relayed this anecdote to NYMag in a piece about the Google Walkout, it opened a whole phony HR investigation in which it was revealed to me that not only did my exit interview never make it to the manager’s file or mine, but the head of Creative Lab said he’d never heard of the HR person (pardon my second all-caps HAHAHAHA here).

We don’t “speak truth to power" for restorative justice, at least not in some immediate, discernible, direct way. Toxic people and departments are going to keep doing their thing. The head of your department doesn’t not know they’re sitting atop a toxic waste dump (“the fish rots from the head down,” as a Google exec who was probably a fish-head in a nascent stage of decomposition herself used to say). But the journey you are embarking on is not really about restitution, but about reclaiming your time (*insert Maxine Waters gif*).  This sounds like a bad, dehumanizing experience and sooner or later you’re going to have to turn that sense of powerlessness into power. A lot of that is an internal journey: what made the management in your department so toxic, the work so meaningless, the experience so roundly soul-crushing? What would you do differently? I personally think the conversation with the dept head is a great opportunity to flex these muscles. Start with talking about your manager (a mere pawn in the game, but a safe space to sketch out the issues so you don’t have to tackle the more triggering-for-all system itself or god forbid, suggesting that this person with tremendous power is in any way responsible for the well-being and “thriving” of their own team!). Be insightful. Be specific. Think of it this way: you’re not spilling your guts so much as reminding them that you have guts. There’s a reason they call it “regretted attrition.”

I’m sure if the neoliberal order holds another decade or two, you’ll be a future leader of America. So take what you can from this experience and don’t be intimidated by the jerks. And if you decide not to say anything honest to the boss, by all means be unsparing/unvarnished with your teammates. Lord knows we’re going to need worker solidarity on the other side of the apocalypse. Good luck in b-school babe!!

Have a query? askclairest@gmail.com. Taking the next 2 weeks off to bask in the glory of America in this special moment in history but see you back “here” in July!

Claire