Your Reputation, Your Career, Your Finances
Striving in your career is seen as necessary for experiencing success, but what if all that hard work leads to your demise? What happens to your finances as a result?
Hello, Talking About Money Community, how are you? ❓
In this post I want to discuss how systems and power dynamics influence to what extent you can experience success in your career, and how that impacts how much you can earn, and thereby, how much financial security that you can attain.
While I wholeheartedly express that I have received myriad opportunities and experienced episodes of success in my career thus far, I have also had my setbacks.
Setback #1
In my first job out of college, I was recruited for a position as part of a well-known national volunteer program. After having run the student volunteer center at my college as a work-study job, I was going to work in the volunteer center at a mid-sized state university, matching student volunteers with local nonprofits who were looking for enthusiastic (and free) help. My new boss appeared quite proud of me at first. He paraded me around town to a series of meetings with nonprofit leaders, showing off his new acquisition. The local newspaper even wrote a story about me! I was feeling hopeful and optimistic that I would be able to make my mark in my first real job.
But my hope and optimism were short-lived. Folks from the local nonprofits started reaching out to me directly to make connections with student volunteers, and my boss did not like it. At all. He started limiting which meetings that I could attend. He then made me give him the password to my office voicemail (yes, back then we each had our own physical telephone with its own voicemail). After only a couple months in this role, my sole tasks were picking up the daily mail and bringing coffee to meetings.
Then the day of reckoning: One rainy evening I was crossing the parking lot to my car, leaving a class that my boss was teaching (I think my role was to make and distribute photocopies). Apparently one last nonprofit request had come into my voicemail, and my boss had just listened to it. He ran after me in the rainy parking lot and began to berate me for insubordination. He threatened to make sure that I would never work in that town again.
Setback #2
More than a decade after Setback #1, I thought that my career was on a role. I had been at my nonprofit for 6 years and I had built a successful department from the ground up, helping hundreds of households attain financial capability through matched savings, homeownership, and self-employment. I was known in my industry and frankly, I was coasting and looking for my next challenge. That came when the vice president of a national nonprofit approached me to ask if I would discuss a position at his agency overseeing a national matched savings program. I was elated! I had been sought out for my skills and I would have the opportunity to do good work, this time on a national scale.
It was a bit of an uphill climb at the beginning, but I was up for the challenge. Though I was told that this was an existing program, once I started, I realized that there were few systems in place, and I found that I was building this program from the ground up. That did not diminish my spirits, instead, I began a listening tour where I interviewed staff throughout the country and began to envision how my national program would take shape.
I was rightly confused when, after 3 months on the job, my boss invited me into his office and shared with me my program goals for the upcoming year (that he had taken the liberty of creating for me). I read them and explained that they were too ambitious and not achievable, given the current state of the department. He waved his hand and told me that they were merely goals, and then handed me a pen to sign that I attested to my marching orders. Not knowing any better, I signed the paper.
Three more months went by, and I was back in his office, my program goals once again laying on the table between us. He calmly stated that I was not on pace to achieve the goals that I had signed my name to, that I was being put on a performance plan, and that I would be fired at the end of June if I did not attain my agreed-upon goals. Spoiler: I never attained the goals.
“Pet to Threat”
I was introduced to the concept of “Pet to Threat” on an episode of the Brené Brown podcast Dare to Lead where she interviewed Jodi-Ann Burey and Ruchika Tulshyan. While the entire episode is worth a listen in its discussion repudiating the concept of imposter syndrome, it was “Pet to Threat” that stopped me in my tracks on my morning walk.
Wait, that sounds familiar…
“Pet to Threat” is a term created by Dr. Kecia M. Thomas in her 2013 academic paper entitled “Moving from Pet to Threat: Narratives of Professional Black Women.” In her research she observed black women being hired into academic institutions and at first being treated in a child-like fashion, as if they are not equal to the work that they were assigned, meaning that they needed to be overly-reliant on their supervisors. Their reputation morphed from “pet” to “threat” later when those same professionals began showing mastery over their work, thereby posing as a threat to their supervisors. This can lead to these professional black women to silence themselves, or for the threatened supervisors to execute their power over their staff.
Erika Stallings expounds on Dr. Thomas’s findings with stories of black professional women – in the fields of law, academia, tech, and beyond -- who have experienced “pet to threat” in the workplace in her piece, “When Black Women Go From Office Pet to Office Threat”. The conclusion to this article recommends that women facing this situation develop a “personal advisory board” who can provide mentorship and support for both the situation at hand as well as long-term career prospects. Having support outside the organization can make for a smoother transition if you are forced to leave your job.
So why is this important to a blog on financial capability? It’s important for you to remember that systems and structures have a powerful influence over opportunities for advancement and success, and a wrong turn at a job might lead to a derailment off your career path, and that might have deleterious effects on your financial security. And what might be true in your own career might also happen to your female clients, so its important to listen actively if a client shares with you a story that starts sunny and ends stormy.
So, what about those setbacks that I described above? While I am not a black woman like those featured in the research of Dr. Thomas, I was fired from both jobs. Each event could have led to an extended period of unemployment that could have wreaked havoc on my finances. Luckily, I had professional relationships built, and those attentive mentors got me my next jobs, though at pay grades lower than what I would have enjoyed had I kept climbing the income ladder. I even continued to work in the town that my first supervisor threatened to banish me from. 😏
