If you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu
January 12, 2020 | 4-minute read
My managers at the IT company insisted that a successful communications employee “demands a seat at the table.” Simply writing business stories, press releases or speeches could not make you the business advisor you needed to be. We communicators had to become “strategic subject matter experts” to help our executives “close the deal” with high-value clients.
My friends and I could not make eye contact with each other when our managers went on the “seat at the table” rant. We had all become communications “professionals” because we were not qualified to remove gall bladders, teach kids how to solve for x, make a fantastic rim shot or advise powerful people what brand of toothpaste to buy let alone how to close a business deal. We would show each other our story or speech, shake our heads tragically and say, “It’s fine, but will it get us a seat at the table?”
One thing that never gets you a seat at the table is being a mom. Another is working from home. Together they are a career killer. I knew it and worked from home as much as possible anyway. I was like the Liv Ullman character in “The Emigrants” who knows that if she keeps having sex with her husband and getting pregnant, she will die in childbirth. Yet she would rather have a short happy life with him than a long joyless slog in a cold marital bed. I did what I had to do.
My ideal work arrangement was a seat at the dining room table, with laptop logged into the company network. At home I could check on my son when he was sick, do the laundry, eat food out of my own refrigerator and accomplish whatever work task was expected of me. And when five o’clock rolled around, I was already home. The evening ahead included dinner, my son’s Nintendo worship, his homework and an hour or two of our playing board games, listening to music and reading. It was a wonderful life and I did not think about work until nine o’clock the next morning.
Officially speaking, the company was fine with working from home, and sometimes, when office space was limited, encouraged it. The workplace reality, however, was less sepia-toned: I remember watching a female executive at my new-hire orientation tearfully proclaim how indebted she was to the company for letting her take her laptop into the ICU where her little daughter was recovering from eye surgery. What she called work-life balance I considered something closer to child abuse. I wonder if that little girl, now around thirty years old, resents her mom for bringing the damn laptop into the recovery room.
A mom — or a dad, who likewise rushed home every evening to be with his family — was never going to get a seat at the table. But who would? My pals and I liked to speculate:
Might it be Clay, the genial clean-cut Mormon Gen-Xer who showed up every morning after his 5:30 a.m. bible study in a suit and necktie?
Might it be Billy, the outgoing glad-hander who strutted around our communications meetings with wireless mic in hand, boosting morale, exhorting esprit de corps, making flat little jokes?
Might it be Anna, who had worked at prestigious PR agencies, and who could tap into the contacts her parents had made at the White House and the Washington Post?
We were way off base.
From out of the communications primordial soup arose the colossus Jason Mingott,* a crunchy granola midwesterner with shoulder-length hair, a garage band called Mountain Betty Smithworks* and a jargonistic writing style. On the strength of his youthful good nature and genius at making tech sound like a school of humanistic psychology, Jason shot out like a human cannonball to the top editor spot at corporate headquarters. Before hurtling into another executive position at a major media company founded by a former big-city mayor, he got himself quoted in The Wall Street Journal and landed his own op-ed pieces in Wired and Fast Company. He was a master juggler at using Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook to announce his corporate travels to Tokyo, Paris, Jakarta, Tel Aviv. I am still in awe at the social media golden boy who could talk about “modality of communication” and “metaphorical firewalls.”
Jason has gone on to have a seat at his own table. He left those top-of-the-pyramid jobs and became a consultancy, complete with full-time employees. The more power to him. He earns a living for himself and his family by going to universities, companies and business associations to talk about employee empowerment while I scrape by on a gig here and there. Jason did what I was unable to do: Shed a childhood love of books, music and writing to talk about stuff like “innovation maximalism.” He talks the talk and walks the walk in a way that would make me feel my life was a great yawning chasm. He deserves a MacArthur Genius Award for keeping himself interested in this biz buzz for the past two decades.
In the end, the mom I am had too many liabilities to get a seat at the table. I was too female, too maternal, too dreamy, too cynical, too literary, too unrealistic, too unaccommodating, too resistant to abstractions about the goodness of technology, too protective of my private life. I was too inclined to ask: What does innovation maximalism bring to the table other than, “Huh?
* Not a real name
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