About getting fired and standing back up

I was 28 when I started to work at a multinational company. I was full of dreams and sky-high expectations about what it will be like. I knew it will be very demanding and that I will have to put a lot of hours into it but I was sure I could get higher because I believed in who I was and it fit perfectly with the vision of the company. On paper…

In reality, things were of course different. Even though some organisations have beautiful and valuable missions, these don’t always come to life in the actual teams of the organisation. In this case, there was a sharp difference between how the management of the team has led their people and what I read online about the values of the company. There was an extremely high level of competition between people in management, when something went wrong, employees were not protected but the entire weight of all the piled-up mistakes was put on their shoulders. Even after one week, I felt that this was not my place, but I gave it a chance.

There were rare moments when I felt connected to this job, even though I had a great relationship with my colleagues. The people I worked with were supportive and funny but were always sour when talking about how things worked in the team. It was obvious very fast that nobody was happy in the team, except my managers. They were thriving, avoiding any responsibility for any of their employees' mistakes and pointing fingers at all small details, not noticing the big picture at all.

I worked at this company for 10 months and I was exhausted all the time. I worked 12-14 hours a day, being responsible for 8 different contracts, while others were responsible for 2-3. I was doing all I could to live up to the expectations of my managers, but while other managers and team members loved to work with me, my own management was never satisfied with me. Then the fall reviews came and we were all rated by people who worked with us, either managers or peers.

One of my direct managers (on a lower level) with whom I had an ok relationship and team leads of other teams I have worked with, have rated me for my performance. For the most part, the reviews showed above-average performance (some other aspects were in the average zone) and everyone has indicated that I definitely am a good fit for the company. One of the next days after that, I was fired… The higher manager who fired me said I didn’t live up to the expectations.

So I am sure you can understand that at this point I was quite confused. How can everyone else be happy with my work, except my higher management and how can they say I didn’t live up to the expectations when everyone I directly worked with was very happy with the job I had done. There are so many questions I never got the answers to... I am quite convinced that I was fired because I was the only one that actually dared to talk to the management about things going wrong in the team and they had a perception of me as someone who complains and brings down morale.

All I knew was that I was not the type of person who gets fired… I worked hard, did my best, I am quick on my feet, and do what is needed. Such people are not fired, right? I was devastated. It was one of the most confronting moments in my life, it made me question who I was and who I wanted to become, where I was going and how I can get there. It took me a few weeks to catch up with myself, sleep well, eat well and stop feeling like a failure.

And then it all turned around. I started to feel stronger and braver, more like myself, not like the person I was the past 10 months. I started to look back at all my previous years and put everything in perspective, build myself up from the ground, remember who I was so I can work toward who I wanted to be. A lot of things have changed in me since then. I was interested in self-improvement before but this time I had a stronger drive to go further. I was dedicated to finding a new job where I could find purpose and not just work for business sharks. If I have to spend most of my life working, then I wanted to make the best of it. It was hard at first to talk about this experience in job interviews, but eventually, I realized that I might not be right in this situation. Nobody knows who is right or wrong but there was clearly a mismatch of expectations from both sides. So this is what I told in all my interviews.

How I ended up at my current job is a whole other story but it does give me joy and fulfillment. I will write about this in another post. My final message here is that everyone is the type of person who gets fired. It is not getting fired that defines us but what we do after that.