Your Employees Don’t Know Your Pain

Article written by Arar Han on Inc

Early in my career, I worked as the special assistant to the CEO of a top U.S. public corporation. A pioneer in his field, I admired the CEO in many ways: he was a serial entrepreneur with a chain of inspiring wins; he spoke crisply and confidently to his constituencies; and he was a real human being, who made mistakes and wore his heart on his sleeve at times. When I came into my boss’s employ, I was determined to work hard, be indispensable to his agenda, and go on to make my own mark on the world.

Work hard I did, and after two years, my boss dispatched me with a full-throated letter of recommendation to a top business school. Fast forward many years, I got an announcement that he had (finally!) written a book about his work and life. “Do read the book,” he said, “You lived parts of it.” I joked that Michael Lewis’s latest was ahead of his in my reading queue, but that I’d get back to him when I picked it up.

Much of the book felt familiar. My starting role at the company was to be my boss’s ghostwriter for all kinds of pieces spanning both public releases and private missives; it would be fair to say I knew him well in the two years I was there. The sayings I learned to work into his draft writings, the ethos that defined his day-to-day dealings, and the issues that defined the circumstances around the company at the time all brought me back to my mid-20s.

And then I got to the part about the activist shareholder.

Not what I remembered

I remember this. I left for business school in the middle of struggle. The company’s stock was battered after a failed product launch and some other operational missteps. They were not fatal issues, but the activist was certainly wielding all they could to try and take control. I knew this at the time, and implicitly trusted my boss to handle them, as he always had. By now, I had seen him manage all manner of conflict, be it interpersonal, managerial, or competitive. I had accepted and absorbed that conflict is part of the CEO role, and assumed that he’d handle this one as he always did.

In the book, though, this conflict was different. My eyes widened as I read about my boss’s account of dealing with the activist’s machinations. As closely as I worked with him daily, monitoring his emails, traveling with him monthly to the company’s other office, and even working weekends when there was a big speech, I had no idea how the activist revolt really affected my boss. The despair and pain, and the sense of being at war that he felt - these came alive to me in a way they had not some 20 years hence. (And this was me! Fully on my boss’s side the whole time, doing all I could to be of professional support!) I felt a wash of embarrassment and guilt come over me, and I put down the book.

Heard the words, missed the meaning

The next morning, I tapped out a message to my long-ago boss: “I feel I could have been a better supporter had I known what all I have learned now, through my own education and through your book…I am sorry for being young and naive. Good thing you sent me to b school to learn a thing or two??!”

There’s a phrase I like: “heard the words, missed the meaning.” It comes to mind now, as I reflect on having been so close to the action and not really having understood the life or death battle I witnessed. Turning the experience around to my own life as the co-head of a team trying to make its mark on the world, it dawns on me that nobody really knows what it’s like to be me either.

When COVID-19 hit as we took control of a travel company, and the next two years became a daily existential crisis for the firm, nobody really got it. I mean, they saw what was happening all around, but the unique set of pressures that my cofounder and I were subject to - the investors whose money we had raised to acquire the entity, the creditors who wanted to know when they’d be repaid, the customers demanding refunds that the company didn’t have the funds to execute, the employees who wanted severance packages exceeding the cash on hand, and the family at home going stir crazy in lockdown - these were ours alone.

And that’s okay. As badly as I feel about not being a better supporter to my CEO boss, I also realize in my own version of the role that nobody needs to share in the pain that is sometimes the top job. Nobody needs to know that the glory they imagine of the C-suite coexists with painful conflict. What they need to do is to focus on their own roles and do them well. They can leave the existential headaches to the big boss, just as I did.