"What did you do to get demoted?" a peer asked me
Welcome to Level Up: Your source for career growth solutions by retired Amazon Vice President, Ethan Evans.
How should I handle the assumption that I must have screwed up?
I had chosen a role I wanted, working as Amazon's executive advisor to the newly acquired Twitch team, and the role reported to a peer of mine (read the full story here).
In my mind, I had selected a job I wanted, one I was excited to do. I knew my peer well, we were old friends, and I knew he would be a supportive manager.
What I had not counted on was how others would interpret my change and how their assessment would sting.
Once my peer asked this question, it made obvious sense.
I moved from a General Manager (GM) of the Amazon Appstore, responsible for $500M in revenue and a global team of 800, to a role working for a peer where my only official report was my executive assistant (EA).
In a growth-oriented world, it is easy to see how someone else would feel if I were being punished!
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The next live podcast/event is watching me executive coach a new client (Regional Vice President in Big Tech) on the topic “How does an Executive spend their day?"
This transition marked the day I willingly stepped off the career track.
I had reached the VP level and started to prioritize mission and meaning in my life more than scope and compensation.
Those around you tend to assume that your past is what you want in the future.
This is one reason changing job families or careers is so hard. If you have been an engineer, we keep seeing you as an engineer even when you try to change gears.
After years of rapid growth, it made no sense to those around me that I would willingly change direction.
My lessons:
If you change yourself, be prepared for shock and misunderstanding. People run your actions through their own filters.
In the end, finding deep meaning and work you love is worth it.
Feelings are real. What others think about us matters to us even if we are very confident. Being misunderstood stunk. I could have put more thought into the communication of my change (and would now if I did it again).
We do not pay enough attention to the power of feelings to shape our work. See the work of Dr. Julia DiGangi for more on emotional power:
“As your story keenly notes, one of *the* most powerful things we can do to increase our leadership is decide that we are powerful enough to be misunderstood.
I often ask my clients:
“Where can you tolerate being misunderstood?
And where can't you?”
When we train our own nervous system to tolerate other people's misunderstandings of us, the sky isn't even the limit for what we can achieve.”
Jeff Bezos on being misunderstood…
On sticking with customer obsession and launching customer reviews: