The changing interpretation I mentioned — the way I was slowly revising my understanding of eighteen years — is not something I can date to a single conversation or a single moment. It happened over weeks, in the way that perspective shifts when you change position.
What I had believed for eighteen years: this is a family business, the rules are different here, the compensation is partly relational, the security is partly belonging.
What I was learning: the relational compensation is real. The belonging is real. The security was never real in the way I had experienced it as real. A family business is still a business and the owner still makes the decisions and if the owner decides your role doesn’t serve the succession plan he has in mind, your role ends.
I had worked for eighteen years in the genuine belief that my contribution was recognized and that my position was stable and that the arrangement was the one I thought it was.
The arrangement was not the one I thought it was.
This is not a betrayal I can attribute to malice. Victor did not build a plan to deceive me. He built a plan that suited his assumptions, and his assumptions about my work and my value were wrong, and the wrongness became visible when the plan was implemented.
What I was left with was the need to build an arrangement that was actually the one I thought it was: written, compensated, bounded.
Two Interviews, One Useful Lesson