Tiny Leadership Story #17
Althea had been the CFO for eleven years. She had the oversized office, the stock options, and the annual review that always said “outperform.” She had built the finance organization from a transaction-processing shop into a strategic function the CEO relied on.
On paper, everything was working. Except, she was flat on Sunday nights. She wasn’t in crisis or failing, just flat.
I asked her to imagine us meeting a year from now, and I asked her to describe what a great year would have looked like?
Her answer felt polished. There was profitable growth, a team development retreat that got everyone aligned, maybe another nonprofit board seat, and a steady home life. It sounded reasonable. It also sounded rehearsed, as if she were working from someone else’s script.
“Why did you choose this path?” I asked.
She thought for a long moment. She said she hadn’t chosen it. She had inherited a trajectory and kept going. Althea’s career had been a series of next logical steps, each one fine, but each one moving her further from a question she had never fully asked herself: what leadership life do you actually want to create?
We built out the scenario. On one side was where she was today: capable, respected, and secure professionally; and personally, caring for aging parents, her only child preparing for college, and quietly restless. When I asked what else, she said, “Lonely, at work and at home.” It has worsened since her divorce two years before.
On the other side was the one-year future she intended to create: not a fantasy, but a specific, honest picture of a future she could feel, not just recite. The gap between today and a year from now was less a problem to solve, and more a choice to make.
It took months. There were no dramatic pivots, just steady reflection and the work of becoming the person who could pursue that future. She stayed in her role and renegotiated the terms of her engagement with herself. She took a board seat in an industry that interested her. She started writing again, which she had stopped in her thirties. She started dating again. She shared more of herself with her team, including what she was working on. It was awkward for her and welcomed by them.
What changed for Althea wasn’t her title or her income. It was the difference between a life she was getting through and a life she was authoring. The flatness on Sunday nights went away because she had stopped treating her future like something that would simply arrive.
An inherited life happens to you. An authored life is chosen, repeatedly.
The Question
Where in your leadership have you inherited a direction rather than chosen one, and what might you author if you started from intention rather than momentum?
“The best way to predict the future is to create it.” — Peter Drucker
Shall we begin?
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