Shield vs. Curtain

Kelleigh ran a twenty-four-person architecture firm she had built over twelve years, from one drafting table to a full practice. She thought of herself as its best architect, not as its CEO.

Holden had been with her for eight of those years. He handled operations, including HR, payroll, vendor relationships, and the difficult conversations. He called it the back-office machinery that Kelleigh had decided she wasn't built for, and that he shielded her from.

When Holden told her in March he needed six to eight weeks away to settle his late uncle's estate, including his uncle's business, Kelleigh expected the firm to wobble. She moved meetings, prepared the team, and warned her husband it might be a rough stretch.

Week one was bumpy. Week two was steadier. Payroll and onboarding, the duties she had assumed only Holden could carry, went to an outside service a client had recommended, which onboarded a new hire so smoothly no one noticed. The team, with Holden out, spoke freely, and routed their questions through Kelleigh. By week four she was running the Friday operations review herself.

One morning Kelleigh finished a call with a fractional Chief Marketing Officer her new HR partner had introduced. Her posture was relaxed. She had not known how much she missed working in creativity and possibility. The work she had been shielded from was not beyond her. Hiding from it had only kept her from growing into it.

That was what she brought to our session.

"You called him a shield for years," I said.

"He was."

"What if he wasn't? What if he was a curtain?"

She responded in a quieter voice. "You could say that I hung the curtain." Then, quieter still: "It was easier to believe I wasn't built to run it, rather than try to open the curtain."

When Holden returned to the office, the estate was not finished; his uncle's business would take most of a year to wind down, so the old arrangement couldn’t resume. They redrew the lines. Kelleigh kept what was hers, not just as the lead architect, but also as the owner and CEO: strategy, new business, the major clients, new direct reports and the conversations she had long handed off. Holden took a reduced role in basic operations, one that fit his schedule and outside responsibilities. The change stuck, and so did the way Kelleigh saw herself.

A shield stops what is coming at you. A curtain you open to what you could become.

The Question

What’s behind the curtain you hung?

"What stands in the way becomes the way." — Marcus Aurelius, Meditations