Operations Research Management Science - Was It Something I Said?

OR/MS Today - June 2002

Was It Something I Said?

The Art of the Transition

By Vijay Mehrotra

I have spent the last several years working closely with one of our business partners, a company called Blue Pumpkin that develops software for Workforce Optimization. I recently accepted a position with this company as vice president of Consulting Services. While several people of the staff from Onward will be joining me, I started my new job a few months before any of them.

I walked into this new role full of confidence. I had a detailed understanding of the company, its market, its products, its customers, its partners, its history, and its people — a perspective that my predecessor in this position lacked. I had a strong vision of what needed to be done to organize several disparate groups into a single powerful and effective consulting organization. My cup of optimism runneth over.

It only took a couple of days for the cup to fall and break and for my optimism to runneth down the drain. I simply did not anticipate the shock of the new position, with greater management responsibility than I ever had before, with diverse dependencies across with many different organizational groups, with all of this playing out in the midst of an intense, fast-paced growth company.

For the next several weeks, my 24x7 inner monologue went something like this: "I'm an utter and complete mess. I feel like a deer in the headlights, dazed and confused and worse yet paralyzed by what feels like an overwhelming stream of issues and problems large and small. I can't do this job — I'm not qualified today and not capable of doing the learning fast enough. This is simply too much for me. I want to run as far and as fast as possible from this responsibility. What am I doing here? What am I doing with my life? I'm totally lost, and I'll never get on top of it all — and these people that I work with and talk to each day all know it. Stop the world, 'cause I gotta get off NOW. Help! Help! Help!"

Sleep was fitful, anxiety oozed from my pores, and a cloud of doubt followed me wherever I went. I did not see a light at the end of the tunnel.

Relief arrived in an unexpected combination. Just before a business trip to the East Coast, a friend who recently changed his professional career gave me a book entitled "Transitions: Making Sense of Life's Changes." The long cross-country flights gave me a chance to read it.

Written by William Bridges, this book considers life's many changes — graduations, weddings, job changes, geographic moves, divorces, children, loss of friends and loved ones, physical changes, retirement — and examines the common characteristics. He breaks down transitions into a three-phase model: first the Ending, followed by a period of inner confusion and chaos (the Neutral Zone), and finally the new Beginning. He makes several observations that resonated with me. In terms of Endings, he points out that the external disengagement from a role or situation is typically far quicker and more definite than the internal process of letting go. The modern focus on efficiency and productivity, he points out, has led us to neglect the contemplation and searching, often highly unstructured/nonlinear/uncharted, that characterize the Neutral Zone. The result: we wander into new beginnings without a sense of release from where we were or reflection about where we are going and why we are going there.

Yup, I realized, that's exactly what I did. I started my new job before my old one even finished. After nearly eight years at Onward, my identity was attached to the company and to my role, much more deeply than I realized. I skipped the Neutral Zone completely, jumping right to the new Beginning. It was no surprise that I lacked the energy to respond to the demands of the new role.

Once I was able to apply the Bridges model, I regained a little bit of perspective about the situation that I put myself in. Looking more objectively at my constant emotional churning, it became clear that further trauma was induced by my own irrational belief that I should be proficient in whatever I choose to engage in on the very day that I start with it. In hindsight it is clear that such unrealistic expectations caused me tremendous anxiety in every transition that I ever made.

Worse yet, these outsized expectations often prevented me from committing to things that I would otherwise be excited about. For example, the mindset that "I'm not a good singer" leads to the decision to avoid investing in learning to sing which in turn results in the inevitable conclusion that "I can't sing."

The irony is remarkable. I come from a family full of professors, including my father. Throughout my life, all of my role models were teachers and educators. I went to graduate school in part to get my "union card" for academia, and I continue to plan for the next phase of my career to be spent as a teaching and consulting professor. Yet my confidence in my ability to effectively get educated — formally through lessons or informally through life — is surprisingly low, despite years of evidence that I will endure, progress and likely succeed.

This is the first major insight that my new job provides, though I'm sure there will be many, many more.

I'll keep you posted.

Vijay Mehrotra is vice president of the Solutions Group at Blue Pumpkin Software. He can be reached by e-mail at Vijay@BluePumpkin.com.

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