Want To Be Boss?
By: Jessika Lakin
Tags: Leadership Development, Career Advice, Work, Fiction, Self

11:15 AM

“And you want to be boss?” Lorraine asked. “I can’t understand what compels you to do the things you do in this company!”

I imagined her shaking her head on the other end of our call.

Never in my life had a manager greeted me with such hostility on the phone as Lorraine. Not even Heather — with her sensitivity around “chain of command” — had used the opening of a phone call to lodge an attack. She had the decency to at least work her way up to a confrontation.

I failed to fathom what compelled Lorraine to talk to me so aggressively, let alone track me down in the middle of nowhere.

“What are you talking about?” I turned to Scott. He shook his shoulders as much in the dark as I was.

“You forwarded an email this morning.”

“Yeah, so?”

“It wasn’t your right to forward it!”

What the hell she is talking about? I thought back to the email announcing approval for the national ad campaign. Nowhere did it say “confidential” or “do not forward.”

“Lorraine…”

“I’m not done talking. You need to retract the email right now.”

“Retract?”

“Recall the message. You need to go into Outlook and recall what you sent this morning.”

“The message is already out. I mean, I’m here with Scott, and we’ve been discussing it all morning.”

“Then, you need to get on the phone and call every single manager in your territory and tell them.”

Tell them what exactly? I shook my head at how ridiculous her request was. Nevermind my embarrassment being yelled at in front of people I’d met only hours earlier. So much for projecting confidence and expertise.

“You want me to call every branch and sales manager and tell them to pretend they didn’t see the email? Or tell them I sent it in error?”

“Yes! It wasn’t your message to send. That message was confidential. I mean, what part of you thought it was okay to forward it?

“Nowhere in Ting’s message did it say it was confidential or not to forward it. If it had, I would have left it alone.”

“Well, that’s just it. You should have known not to forward it. No one else on the team passed that message along to their managers. It was the knee team’s, and you’ve completely robbed them of their thunder.”

I shook my head. “You know what, Lorraine? There was nothing in that email that my people didn’t already know from rumors leaked by the knee team themselves over the past six months. So don’t sit there and act as if I have somehow spilled insider information that compromises our company. I haven’t, but besides that…when was it going to be okay to share it? We’ve been sitting out here in the field with nothing but bad news since the reductions began over the summer.”

“You need to retract the message. Reach out to Brick and all the others and tell them what I’ve told you to do.” Lorraine paused to take a breath. “Call me back when you’re done!”

“Are you okay?” Scott asked.

I held Judy’s phone in my hands for several seconds. “In case it wasn’t clear, you need to act like you never heard a peep about Get Your Go from me.” I stared out the front window of Scott’s pickup, the windshield wipers swooshing back and forth to remove sleet and snow.

“Don’t worry. I get it,” Scott said. “Make your calls.”

Brick’s assistant, Reyna, topped my list of people to call. She agreed to call the twenty-plus sales managers while I focused on the general managers. “Will you patch me through to Brick?”

“Hi, Jess. What’s up?”

Brick listened as I repeated the details of my call with Lorraine. “I don’t understand why she’s so upset. Everyone already knew about the knee team’s campaign.”

“Yes, but I suppose approval of the ad spend is what everyone was waiting on and what she feels the knee team had the right to reveal first.”

“This is ridiculous. Listen to me. Every single manager in our region has your back, Jess. I don’t care what Lorraine thinks; you did the right thing in my book. Call every manager if you need to, but we stand behind your message.”

What a relief to know someone believed in me…several someones. I reached out to the seven remaining GMs before calling Lorraine with an update. Each one echoed what Brick said about having my back.

“It’s done. I’ve reached out to Brick and all the others,” I said.

“Thanks, but I guess what I want to know is if you stopped at any point to think maybe you shouldn’t send the email? This is exactly what I’m talking about when I tell you that you lack the maturity to be a director! You’ll never get to be boss if I have anything to do with it.”

Her words took my breath away as any sliver of a future promotion faded into the ether. They articulated her justification for further withholding the only chance I’d ever have of moving up and making more money.

I caught Scott studying me out of the corner of my eye, my face and neck turning red. Did he fear I might explode? I wanted to scream, the heat of anger raging through my blood. The more politically astute — or mature — might have stopped talking or agreed with Lorraine. I couldn’t do that, though, not when I had mouths to feed at home plus a reputation to salvage.

Her question spun around in my head, did I at any point stop to think? “Yes, as a matter of fact. There was a brief moment before I hit send on my phone. I literally asked myself whether I should send the message or not.”

“And?”

“I questioned if I should ask you or someone else about what to do, and then I remembered that as ACTING director, I needed to do what leaders do. Leaders don’t wait around for someone to tell them what to do. They lead by taking action!”

Lorraine took a noticeable breath on the other end of our call, and I perceived the slightest downshift in hostility.

“You know, you keep telling me I lack maturity, that I’m not director quality. The truth is, it doesn’t matter what I do because you have a filter for how you see me. You will perceive anything and everything I say or do as void of mature thinking. Well, you’re the only one who thinks that. I spoke with Brick, who informed me he — along with eight GMs — has my back and believes in me.

“Disagree all you like, but I acted like the director of my 10-state region when I emailed my team this morning because I knew the communication would restore confidence in their work! The field has received nothing but one piece of bad news after another for the past six months from corporate, from the reduction in force to reductions in commissions to loss of leadership. I would never have sent that message had any part of it remotely implied not to, but it didn’t.

“And I haven’t robbed the knee team of anything they haven’t robbed themselves of over the past several months. As a leader, I chose as the person in charge of patient marketing in my territory to share some good news. I did nothing wrong other than fuel your already negative perception of me. I’m not like everyone else on the team, hell, I’m not like anyone in the company, and frankly, I don’t want to be!”

Lorraine’s silence was deafening, but damn if I was going to speak first.

“Thank you for making the calls, Jessika. I’ll be in touch.”

And just like that, the drama was over…or at least the immediate impact of it was complete. I asked Scott to take me straight to the airport. I had no appetite for lunch.

I sat in the window seat and cried as the regional jet returned me to Austin. Nothing was working out in my favor, and I would need something — anything — to help me put things in perspective once I made it home.