Numbered Among the Wanting (A Second Part)

I’m wrong too many times; I see it. I think everyone sees it too.I am becoming very delayed in how I perceive people. Not in perceiving them exactly, but in concluding who they are. Taking a position, mentally, and holding it as fact. A colleague once told me they couldn’t have guessed, at first glance, that I was someone who threw out funny, sarcastic lines to get people talking. I won’t call it stoic, but I’ll admit that my face carries a certain innocence, the kind that lets people get it wrong from a distance. I’ve noticed the pattern goes both ways. Until you get close to someone, you rarely understand why they do what they do. It’s true of others. It’s true of me. Three years ago, I joined a new team at the office, in a software engineering department. Much of my work passed through multiple levels of review before anything moved forward. And at the final stage, I kept hitting a wall. I called. I physically went to ask for documents to be signed. Project after project, the same blocker, the same delay. So I built a theory. The man responsible for final approval, I decided, was trying to remind me who held the authority to move my work forward or hold it back. It felt like a power move dressed up as diligence, over work I’d already done thoroughly. And once that thought found a place to live in me, it stayed. It’s the easiest thing, holding an opinion of someone. Good or bad, it costs nothing to keep. So I kept mine. By my own retrospective account, I had deductively concluded he simply wanted to feel powerful. That was the whole of it. I wasn’t alone in that verdict either. The story about him had made its way around before it ever reached me, and I simply added my voice to what was already unanimous. However wrong that turned out to be. Then instructions came down to fast-track some product deliveries, and I ended up working closely with him, day to day. For the first time, I saw his judgment process up close, and the weight of blame that landed on him whenever a product failed after going live. I felt ashamed, and I felt it without any cushion, that I had taken something out on him he hadn’t earned. It made sense to me then in a way it hadn’t before. He had been to prison at some point. In the months since, when I’ve had my own run-ins with my line manager over the quality of work going out, he has been the one steady thing. If a decision needs defending, it doesn’t get past him. And when I’ve needed someone to lobby on my behalf, he’s stood in for me without hesitation. I have never been to prison. I have never led a team of twenty people, some of them managers themselves. I have never had to stand before an executive board and answer for a failure. He has done all of that. Opinions get made about a person who’s lived through things like that, and I had made mine along with everyone else. Once I saw him clearly, I started seeing myself more clearly too. When everyone you deal with seems to have a problem, maybe you’re the problem. I think about the kind of manager I might become, and I’m not convinced I’ll find that balance between empathy and firmness people talk about. I suspect I’ll have excesses, because I can see them in myself already. I like doing things alone. When I do need to fold my work into someone else’s, I want it treated as an input, not something built together. Even in presentations, I prepare as if no one else is in the room. I can nearly recite my colleagues’ lines, answer questions meant for them. Not because I don’t trust them, but because that’s how I prepare, as if I’m the only one carrying it. I just prefer a piece of work to be shaped, arranged, and finished by my own hands. That’s the trouble. By the time I ask for help, you can be sure I needed it badly. Help can read as weakness in a corporate space, so the safer thing is to sort yourself out, unless something urgent is at stake. You either learn slowly, or you learn. That same pattern followed me into a run of managers, mostly women, who made the work harder than it needed to be. I don’t say that to make a broad claim about women managers. It’s simply been my experience, more often than not, since I started working. I try to put my best foot forward with work I understand clearly, but that clarity takes time to build, and expectations rarely wait around with patience. I don’t forgive myself easily for my own mistakes, even though I extend that grace freely to other people. So the good managers I’ve had have been the outliers. But something in all of this stays with me: time gives you an opinion, and then, if you let it, time takes that opinion back. When I deal with difficult managers now, and I can already see the shape of a situation not going my way, I lean into a kind of careful professionalism. I write things down. I document conversations. I offer what I know while making room for their view, and I’m usually the first to set my own position aside if that’s what keeps things moving. I’ll be a manager myself one day, and there are things I hope don’t come out of me. I hope I never delay signing off on something just to prove who’s in charge. I hope that when someone questions a judgment I’m not equipped to make, I stay open enough to see it differently. I hope I never raise my voice over something ordinary just because the rest of my life isn’t going well. I hope I earn respect instead of demanding it. I hope I catch myself before I reach for superiority, before the words get laced with something unkind. Life doesn’t move like a film, so I’m left watching time crawl through all of this. What I can say for myself is a certain reticence, a habit of holding a reaction in until it settles. Most of the time, I hold that space for other people too. It’s a small act of grace, a hope that they’ll find their way back to me without any friction at all. I hope the anecdotes of the female managers die a natural death somehow someday. I truly hope.

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