Somebody has a bad quarter, and the room thins out around them.
Nobody is hostile. Nobody says anything. People just put their heads down into their own work and wait for it to pass. Trouble is catching, and everyone knows that without ever being told.
I have watched it happen many times. I have never once seen anyone name it while it was going on.
In the book I wrote that care and support get sold as pillars of culture, with an asterisk. Conditions apply.
That is not a complaint. It is a description, and the description is worth more to you than the complaint would be.
I wrote the harder half of it as "you" on purpose, and I left it that way, because I am not standing outside it.
The fact itself is not the interesting bit. The age you learn it at is.
Most people learn it in their forties, and they take it as betrayal. Something shuts. They decide the whole thing was always a transaction, they start behaving that way, and they are a little worse to work with for the next twenty years, all off one bad quarter and one quiet room.
The duller reading is the more accurate one.
The rewards and the penalties of your work are personal before they are shared. That is not a judgement about the people around you. It is just how the thing is built. Nobody designed it to be unfair. It is what happens when every person in the building has their own number to hit.
Learning that early changes where you put your effort.
You stop trying to build insurance that does not exist. You stop reading quiet as hostility, which it usually is not. And you get much more careful about the one thing that travels with you, which is whether your work stands up on a day when nobody is speaking for you.
I will not pretend this is a comfortable way to see it.
It takes something away. Believing the room will catch you is a nice way to work, and losing that belief is a real loss. It is not a free trade.
I would still rather lose it at thirty than find out at fifty.
One thing I have never worked out.
How do you tell somebody this without doing damage?
Say it to someone in their first years and it sounds like cynicism. You have given a twenty four year old a reason to trust nobody, which is the opposite of the point, and worse than the thing you were warning them about. Say it at forty five and you are describing something they found out last Tuesday.
I have watched both land badly. I have not found the version that works.
If somebody told you this early, and it made you careful rather than cold, I would like to know who it was and what words they used. Reply to this one. I read them.
Until next week,
Avinash
Avinash Kaul is a keynote speaker on resilience, reinvention and leadership, and the author of The Next Mountain (HarperCollins). To book him to speak: [email protected] · avinashkaul.in/speaking