My Unconventional Journey

My company Wizard Consulting / AgileJulie / Bold Authenticity celebrates 25 years in business (25th Anniversary Post)

My unconventional journey has put me in a unique, yet powerful, position to help my clients find their personal power by connecting deeply to their truest, most authentic selves at work and in life.

Over the next few months, I will be sharing lessons I have learned during this 25 year journey. 

But first let me share a bit of my origin story, which has led me to become intensely passionate about helping women live and lead with unapologetic authenticity, in full alignment with the values and vision for themselves and their businesses.

It’s probably surprising to many of you that when I graduated from college my sole ambition was  to climb the corporate ladder in record time. I planned to be a supervisor in 3 years, a department head in 6 and a director a few years after that. Yet, by the age of 25, not only was I not climbing the corporate ladder, I was quitting traditional corporate life and taking an early retirement package from my second job, IBM.

So what happened? I was very idealistic. I believed that my company would value me and take care of me. I trusted people to do what they said, and believed in doing what was best for the company. [Can you relate to wanting this at work? - if so please comment]

 It only took me a few years to become jaded.

It didn’t help that I started with my first companies at the time they were doing their first layoffs - ever. I talked to a lot of people impacted by these and I heard their stories. Some were pretty bad. I still didn’t think it could happen to me. 

As a new employee, I found myself frustrated by how decisions were made. Too often they were illogical or lacked integrity. I argued a lot. I always wanted to understand why we did things and resisted approaches that didn’t make sense. In one case, while working as an engineer, we paid an extra $50K to rush prototypes to meet a deadline, when everyone knew we weren’t ready to use them. They sat under my desk for 4 months. They were plastic and would have cost less than $100 if we had waited. It drove me crazy. 

I also became jaded by the racial and gender inequities I witnessed in the workplace. In my first organization, a salary study revealed the Black employees were earning a full standard deviation less than their White counterparts. Coming from an ivy league institution and negotiating well, my salary was the only one on par. I still felt invincible until an older Black employee explained how performance reviews could be used as weapons. He described that just like me, he had been getting consistent ‘walks on water” performance reviews earlier in his career. Around the time he should have been up for promotion, his supervisor changed and he received a below average review (his performance hadn’t changed). Eventually he changed jobs and his performance appraisals were great again, but he had lost a couple of years. A few years (and managers) later it happened again. He got another bad review for no good reason. To make matters worse, he was now viewed as unpromotable, because he was in the same position for such a long time. I realized that I wasn’t invincible in this setting. Even though I was very good at playing politics, there was a lot beyond my control. 

I eventually moved to IBM where I thrived and started to trust the system again. When it became time to change roles, I had several options. The woman who became my new supervisor had pursued me aggressively, making big promises about the work I would be doing. It only took me a few weeks in the new role to realize that she had pulled a fast one. She needed to fill a dead end job and had grossly misrepresented the role. When I asked permission to switch teams, I was told, maybe in a year or two. I felt trapped. A few months later, IBM started offering early retirement packages. There was no minimum service and I hated my job. I took the package and got paid to leave.

These examples, as well as other factors, led me to completely stop trusting the system.

I became a rebel, finding creative ways to do business that were more in line with my values. 

Fast forward 15-20 years. After hopping from project to project for years and reinventing myself along the way (with long breaks and a lot of vacations), I started working in the Agile space. As an Agile coach and trainer I found my work to be aligned with my values in a way that I had not experienced before. Many tenets of Agile such as: collaboration, focusing on what’s valuable to the customer, trusting your people, transparency, root cause analysis, and radical candor resonate so well with me. I started to love my work. I have become an evangelist for Agile. I also rediscovered my love for coaching and developing people.

In many ways, I have always been unapologetically authentic.

Whether it was speaking up when others don’t feel comfortable, being playful in an environment that had always been very serious, being transparent when it might make me look bad, setting boundaries and sticking to them, coming up with a creative solution, or saying no to something that's not aligned to my values, I’ve often broken with tradition.

Throughout my career, I’ve noticed that people around me long to just be themselves, but often believe in certain environments (such as work) this is impossible. I’ve also observed that the leaders that we trust and admire the most are typically very authentic and value authenticity in others. As I’ve lived and worked in my unconventional but authentic way, I’ve had hundreds of comments  that something I did was inspirational in some way. I used to not get it. Now I realize how much of a superpower authenticity can be. It’s not that people want to be like me, it’s that people want to show up as their authentic selves and still be successful. 

I have never felt as aligned and at peace as I now feel in my business.

Helping people get in touch with their most authentic self feels like it may be my life’s work. It feels like all of the experiences of my 25 year journey have led me to my most recent incarnation of my business, Bold Authenticity.