Nobody asked what this meant for me, in the meeting. Afterward, Jana found me in the break room and asked if I was okay. I said I was fine, and then I went back to my desk and spent an hour doing my job, which is what I do when I don’t know what else to do.
I asked Victor, directly, about two weeks after the announcement. Sunday dinner, my mother’s house. I said I wanted to understand how my role would change as Luke took on more.
He said something about leveraging my strengths in a support function.
I said, “What does that mean, practically?”
He said they’d work it out. He said these things take time to define. He said I shouldn’t worry.
I should have pressed harder. I know this now with the clarity you get after something has happened that you might have prevented. I should have said: I need a specific answer before I continue in a state of uncertainty. I should have said: I have managed the major accounts for fifteen years and I need to understand whether I am managing them next quarter.
I did not say these things. I accepted “we’ll work it out” because I had been accepting versions of “we’ll work it out” at Morgan Freight Coordination for eighteen years, and because I had been trained, by family dynamics and by the particular culture of a family business where the founder is also your father, to smooth over rather than push through.