Overcoming Career Setbacks
Reaching the top of the corporate pyramid is rare, but it’s especially tough for women and minorities.
Every career has its chutes and ladders, pauses and moments of opportunity.
We turn to two executives who faced periods of indecision during their careers and found inspiration for what to do next. As it happens both are black.
When Deborah Wright, CEO of Carver Bankcorp, New York was laid off from the investment bank First Boston she turned to Robert Holland, the first black partner at McKinsey and Company but is perhaps better known as CEO of Ben and Jerry’s for advice about what to do next.
She says his immediate response was, “Those guys just did you a big favor.” And she continues, “As I looked up from lunch to see if he had misheard me or temporarily taken leave of his sense, he continued, “Now you’ve faced the moment everyone fears in their career. You’re now free to do what will make your happy.”
Still it took several months of what Ms. Wright said was deep confusion, reflection and meeting anyone and everyone recommended to her. Over time she changed her networking approach and the question she asked people who agreed to meet with her. “I changed the question from can you get me an interview at so and so” to “what would be fun and worthwhile for me to do in a city like New York,?” she said.
She decided to leave investment banking and first went to work for the Partnership for New York City.
There were trade-offs leaving investment banking where there was more money to be made. Still, she says the career where she asked herself, will my efforts make a difference to someone or something,” was a choice that she says feels changed a lot of lives for the better.
Donald A. Coleman, the CEO of Globalhue, a multi-cultural advertising agency headquartered in Southfield, Michigan, experienced a career setback early on. Drafted to play pro football after college he was traded from the New Orleans Saints to the New York Jets where he was injured twice. He left pro sports to begin a career in advertising
At a time when women and minorities were seldom represented in car buying, he presented an idea for a new division to serve them. Management decided it was premature idea. Still he took what he learned and became an entrepreneur logging long hours , opening his own shop and in the beginning doing everything himself. And he came to rely on his own observations more. He writes, “This is now a consumer centric business environment and you must understand how the consumer incorporates brands into their lifestyle and what mediums convey messaging they find most credible.”
Tags: career decisions, Carver Bankcorp, consultants, executives, Globalhue, intutition, McKinsey and Company, mentors
