Tough-love career development

You want to hear some tough-love stories? I know the genre well: horrible job reviews. They came when I worked for two consulting firms, McKinsey and Booz Allen Hamilton, between 1999 and 2001. I had joined McKinsey from the accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers, where I had had a great run as a writer and editor in my first job after 15 years in business journalism. However, the team I worked with at PwC relocated from Manhattan to Jersey City, and I then lived in Connecticut. That commute required taking three trains each way. In a spasm of practicality, ego and a wildly inflated sense of my capabilities, I talked my way into a job with McKinsey in Stamford, much nearer my Fairfield County home. 

McKinsey has always had a reputation as a tough place to work, being compared to the Marines and the Jesuits. A colleague at PwC warned me about going there. I dismissed her astute advice. I deemed myself ready for a move to more responsibility. I wasn’t; I should have stayed at PwC, commute be damned or negotiated for work in the Stamford office. 

But I didn't take those paths.

Already stressed over a troubled home life, I struggled with my job as communications manager for the marketing practice. A review from May 5, 2000, after less than a year on the job, rated me as having “Issues,” one step above “struggling.” The reviewer collected input from people I worked with. She fairly listed my strengths and accomplishments.

On the plus side:

• Enthusiastic about working to implement a comprehensive external relations program
• Set up a competitive intelligence newsletter
• Proactive in preparing materials for an Internet Marketing Conference (at the time I was taking Prednisone, which just about put me a mental ward as it exacerbated the extreme tension at home and work). 

Then reach the key development actions.

•  “Needs to improve the quality of writing—ensure more value added. Focus on what the implications are for the target audience. Push the thinking” rather than just implement changes suggested by the authors.
• Proactively take advantage of help being offered
•  Assume better control of the process.

I never even reached out to PwC, although that might have worked. Instead, I jumped to another job in consulting before my next McKinsey review. All the issues traveled with me to Booz Allen's thought leadership journal, Strategy & Business. The world of deep dives into corporate strategy and management just wasn’t my forte. I'm far more concrete in my thinking and writing, never adept at interpreting MBA-level analytics. That and my personality foibles were a crippling combination. 

Even more agonizingly detailed than the McKinsey review, my “assignment performance” was “may be a problem.” Creating articles with consultants showed “a need for Van to be more aggressive in the value creation and/or process management aspects of this objective.”

And another: 

“Van should proactively seek help from his managers on projects when he truly needs it. Balanced against that, he should try to address the situation to find an alternative, using his own experience and/or reaching out to peers or his proposed mentor. And so it went for 10 pages."

Booz Allen laid me off in July 2001 as the dot-com bubble economy started to implode. The job loss kept me out of Manhattan on 9/11.

Why gaze into this mirror reflecting back some of the most horrendous years of my life? For decades I stored the reviews in a "career development" folder, never reading them. Finally, I decided to consider them, not out of a sense of masochism but to try to learn from them, a quarter century later. 

Taking a long perspective, the evaluations were fair, a form of tough love to get me to do what I was hired to do. I wasn’t a kid, after all. I think of them as a corporate version of couples therapy telling me what I needed to hear (and hear again). After those two positions, I vowed to never let status or high pay seduce me. Booz Allen's tough love turned into the best career move I've ever made. In February 2002 I got a job as a proposal writer for KPMG as the Enron scandal shook up the accounting industry. I had never even seen a proposal until I started writing them, but I found a job that ideally suits my communications strengths and competitive drive. With proposals, your team either wins or loses. It's as simple as that. Dazzling insights for the C-suite matter less than making a persuasive pitch to buy a firm's services. That's a language I understand. 

To this day I’m still writing proposals, elsewhere. And the lessons I learned at McKinsey and Booz Allen, what caused me so much grief, stayed with me. Be active, not passive. Watch out for procrastination. Find work that plays to my strengths. Show the confidence to tell people, "I don't understand what you're trying to say here." Offer alternative ways of making your case. 

Now I get high marks for writing and managing proposals, and even do writers' workshops called “The Wallach Way.” 

Life rarely moves in a direct line, either personally or professionally. In between terrible job reviews, layoffs, firings, unemployment, ill-starred moves, waking up at 4 a.m. in a cold sweat—I stumbled into every possible career briar patch. But here I am, evidently doing something right. Proposals still work for me. As I once explained to co-workers about why, I simply said, "I like to win."