The sting of my coworker’s betrayal sent me straight to the job boards, where an opening for a research associate/enterprise architect in the School of Medical Informatics grabbed my heart. It was a dream job, and I had every skill they were looking for—except one. I did not have leadership experience.
Dejected, I slumped back in my chair. There was no way they would hire me. I wasn’t a leader. I couldn’t even take control of a meeting from someone who was supposed to be my friend, but I heard in my spirit, “This position is for you.”
I applied.
There were several grueling interviews, which went pretty well, but in the last interview with the program director, he asked the dreaded question.
“What makes you think you can lead?”
I had only one story to tell.
After my family moved to Avalon in August 1993, we continued to drive back to the city for church but, after several hit-or-miss months, we quit. I am a local-church kind of gal; traveling more than a few miles to attend church doesn’t sit well with me. However, once settled in my programmer analyst job, I began to long for the expressive corporate worship, and, even more so, I wanted to keep singing. I prayed for a new church, and in January 1996, we found a new home at Mt. Zion Baptist Church.
Our first visit to Mt. Zion was during a snowstorm. My children and I braved the elements, walking a mile through blowing snow. There were only a few people there when we arrived, but my perseverance through the inclement weather endeared me to them. It wasn’t long before the choir, the Gospel Singers, invited me to join them. I must admit, we got off to a rocky start, but they soon voted me in as their president. That was a first. I knew nothing about leading, but I knew how to serve, so that’s what I did. Coincidentally, this style of leadership has a name—servant leadership, and it was exactly what the program director was looking for.
In September 1998, he became my new boss, and my annual salary doubled. The increase was right on time, because during my son’s senior year of high school, his excellent grades and notoriety on the football field attracted the attention of Ivy League schools. As he sent applications to Harvard, Princeton, Yale, and the University of Pennsylvania, my knee-jerk reaction was to stifle his ambition. Ivy League schools did not grant football scholarships, and in 1998, the tuition was $30,000 a year. I did not want that kind of debt.
“Lord, what should I do?” I prayed.
I heard in my spirit. “Do not quench his desire. He will go to Harvard.”
Though he was admitted to Harvard, he didn’t go to school there. He chose Penn instead and played football for the Quakers because I never told him what I discerned concerning Harvard. Would that have influenced his decision? I don’t know, but I didn’t deter him from the Ivy League, and thank goodness, I had a way to pay for it with my new job as a research associate/enterprise architect.
As a research associate, I taught graduate-level OOAD classes, but as enterprise architect, I prepared the hearts and minds of the software engineers who would build our future architecture—a distributed architecture made of components.
They needed to be creative.
They needed to be brave.
They needed someone to motivate them towards that goal.
That someone was me.
I established the Technical Resource Group (TRG) composed of forty of the best and brightest software developers in the medical center. We got together once a month. Each meeting began with a distributed component presentation (delivered by me), and then a TRG member used the remaining time to showcase their own work. Two years in, they were on fire, and so was I; however, getting the directors and VPs on board would require a different strategy—one that I lacked. Right after I started my employment, I had to host a meeting for them, and some technical difficulties threatened to derail my presentation. I was so stressed out; surely they would see how powerless I felt in their presence.
At the closest window, I looked up at the clear blue sky, and prayed. “Lord, help!”
I heard in my spirit, “Just have fun.”
Then, the technical difficulties remarkably resolved, and the meeting proceeded as planned.
Teaching OOAD classes and leading the TRG was so, so much fun, but I never got comfortable interacting with the towering tiers above me. No matter what I accomplished, or how much education I accumulated1, I never felt good enough. I literally got indigestion from working with higher-ups. Week after week around that great oblong conference table, they talked health system politics while my stomach rumbled.
“Missed breakfast again,” I would say as I grinned and shrugged my shoulders.
I wasn’t fooling anyone. Most of the men and women who sat around that table did not like me, but they didn’t care for the program director either. From the beginning, they wanted to outsource the health system integration, but my boss always convinced them to wait. He knew (and so did I) that the best and most long-lasting strategy was to develop it in-house. However, after two and a half years, we lost the fight. The integration effort was no longer ours to influence or direct.
Humiliated, I retreated to my corner office and considered the three words that changed my perspective about work.
“Just have fun.”
Career Dream #2: Fulfilled 1998 (Research Associate/Enterprise Architect).
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A Speculative Memoir
In a 1989 journal entry, I poured out my dashed dreams to God. Those few precious moments became a watershed event in an unfolding narrative that began ten years before when I turned my back on God. Turning my back on God did many things, most of them sad, but foremost it made me forget who I was. But there was someone who never forgot. Someone who neve…
I was simultaneously pursuing a PhD in the Diffusion of Technology Innovations at the University of Pittsburgh Katz Business School and School of Information Science. It focused on how to persuade organizations to adopt new technologies.