Member-only story
From Broken to Thankful
My Journey Through The Past Week
This article was originally published on LinkedIn on July 12, 2023.
The path to people leadership looks different for everyone. For some, it’s a natural extension of their personality, the kind of people who naturally take charge and lead by charisma. For others its more of a struggle; those of us gifted in other ways can find it difficult to move from solving technical problems to solving problems where people are the major moving pieces. People are messy, emotional, irrational; understanding people and knowing what to do takes hard work. My personal journey to people leadership only started through the urging of a former manager to consider it as a career option, something I had never seriously done before. He saw something in me that I hadn’t seen in myself: the capacity for leading people with empathy. And so, I began my journey, first dipping my toe into what it meant to be a people manager, reading some books about leadership and management, attending a seminar for prospective managers, and eventually being given an opportunity to lead a small team. Despite the objections of my Impostor Syndrome, here, I thought, I had found something that I might be good at, something that has a long-term capacity for advancement and career development. Then I got a job at Ally.
