Morgan Friedman: Hello, everyone. Welcome to the latest episode of Client Horror Stories. Very excited to have Sira Laurel with me tonight. How are you doing, Sira?

Sira Laurel: I’m doing well. It’s good to be here.

Morgan Friedman: Well, we had a very fun intro call recently, and I have my drink in hand. Excited to hear your story. Let’s jump right into it.

Sira Laurel: Let’s do it.

Morgan Friedman:  Oh, let’s take it away, we are all ears.

Sira Laurel: Well, let’s start from the very beginning. When I graduated college, it was with a Spanish degree. And what does one do with that? I didn’t know. I had wanted to get a philosophy degree, but my parents were very pragmatic and said, “Absolutely not, you’ll never be employed with that.” So I thought, well, I still want to stay in the arts, I still want to stay on the kind of qualitative side of things. Half the world speaks Spanish, I’ve been taking Spanish for a little while now, I’ll just do that. So yeah, that was my baby-brain decision-making at the time. I graduated in 2008, so there was a financial crisis, big time in the United States, and there weren’t a lot of opportunities out there. So I went to a temp agency in my hometown and I got a role at a medical device company. I started out as a benefits adviser. We sold post-operative equipment, and it was in that environment that I thrived. I apparently was a great systems thinker, which I absolutely use today in my current line of work. I was really adept at understanding the friction in the flow and figuring out where our constraints were and solving for them. And I caught the attention of my CFO and manager, and started to make good relationships with the leadership team, which started to gain me some enemies in our back office.

Morgan Friedman: Ooh, the story’s starting to get fun.

Sira Laurel: Yes. Yeah. So I thought that because I had ascended every institutional ladder before that — you achieve by getting good grades, and then people clap and reward you, and you move on to the next step — I thought this was going to be the same. But no, there’s politics. There’s social networks. There’s office “betties” who think of themselves as in charge even though they don’t have any formal power. And I didn’t know what any of those things were. So I’m just going along being like, I’m going to be the best, and everyone’s trying to be the best, right? And that was not liked by a lot of folks. So that was my first introduction to—

Morgan Friedman: By the way, you’re hitting on an important point that I want to emphasize, because it’s kind of subtle. I think growing up, we’re in a system where success or failure is determined by objective standards — basically, you get a good grade on the test or not. And I think what happens to so many people is, after college, people who are used to “I know how to get the A on the test” think the same applies in corporate America, so they go in with that mentality, and then it’s a total shock when it’s politics, and you’re like, “Oh my god, wait, I thought they were my best friend, but now they’re backstabbing me — but I was doing such good work, what happened?” So it’s a wake-up call that I think everyone needs to have at some point in their life.

Sira Laurel: Yes. Well, and they’re going to get it. Anybody who exits college and goes into any corporate career — no one is teaching anybody in college how to survive corporate politics.

Morgan Friedman: That is why this podcast exists.

Sira Laurel: Yes, exactly. So yes, I’m your warning. Every other episode is, “Please learn from this, keep your eyes open, keep your eyes wide, and you can avoid some of these hurts and these pains.” So yeah, I was in for a rude awakening entering into this initial workforce. I was there for five years, and while I was ascending, enrolling in responsibility, and achieving and being recognized for that, I was simultaneously being beaten down by the system around me.

Morgan Friedman: But by the way, I know we’re not yet at the exciting story we’re building up to, but can you give us a small example for the audience of the way you were being beaten down? I’m trying to put myself in the shoes of a twenty-one-year-old recent graduate listening to this, and it makes sense in theory, but how do people beat you down when you’re doing a good job at your work? Do you have a small example to share?

Sira Laurel: Yeah, definitely. So I didn’t have this terminology until I actually went to graduate school and studied organizational psychology and organizational development, and I learned about us-versus-them dynamics. I learned about power hierarchies and structures, social networks and cliques. We experience that in middle school and high school, where you’d have this group and that group, but it was pretty harmless — you could still just do a good job in class and you’d be rewarded for doing a good job. It didn’t matter what your social network was. Well, inside an organization, it really does, because those people can talk poorly to your boss about you. They can say you have an attitude, or you start hearing, “Oh, you have a resting [expletive] face,” like I did. Well, I think I’m just focused — that’s really what’s happening here. I’m not being distracted by the gossip, I’m not being distracted by the water-cooler talk. I’m just in the zone, actually creating guidelines and policies and written documentation that’s helping all of us do our jobs better. I don’t know why we hated this so much, but it was that type of stuff — these little moments where I’d hear something and go, “Wait, what?” I’m obviously changing names, but — “Wait, what does Susie think? Susie literally comes to me every day and asks me questions, and I help her every day.” She’s talking smack about me, she’s calling me an opportunist. What does RBF stand for? So I’m just learning all these things about all these people who are playing nice to my face and then complaining about me, and for whatever reason — jealousy, insecurity, who knows? 

Morgan Friedman: I grew up a Latin and Greek classics nerd, and this reminds me of a line of Seneca’s. I once read one of his letters where he said, “The first art that those who aspire to power need to learn is how to bear hatred.” 

Sira Laurel: Yes. That is exactly what I was doing without knowing it.

 Morgan Friedman: You learn the art of how to bear hatred.

Sira Laurel: Yes, exactly. And there are leaders who have earned that hatred, and I had not.

 Morgan Friedman: Right

Sira Laurel: I was helping, not hindering. I was being inclusive, I was being a representative.

Morgan Friedman: The subtle power of Seneca’s line is that it doesn’t matter whether you’re a power for good or for bad — there are people who are going to hate you no matter what.

Sira Laurel: No matter what. Yes. So this — I was very confused by this. I did not have that Seneca line at this time. I did not have the education of the Stoics at that time.

Morgan Friedman: By the way, I’ll point out — I did, but you kind of learn it in theory; you still need to go through all that in real life to really internalize it and realize it.

Sira Laurel: Totally. Yes. So absolutely, this was my trial by fire — power dynamics, social networks, how dysfunctional a human system, an organizational system, can be. How the system can simultaneously reward the same behavior that some see as positive — there’s a duality inside the same space. Some can see it and go, “Yes, absolutely, keep going,” and others see it and absolutely hate you and want to take you down for it. So that’s what I mean by, as I was going up, I was being torn down, and it was so painful. I am a highly sensitive person — I can sense the subtlety in emotion, in social dynamics. I walk into a room and I can feel the change, just the micro-expression on someone’s face that changes, or their body language, the tone of what they say. And it was driving me crazy. But I kept trying to remember that I’m being rewarded for this — my executives, my leadership team, they see me as doing a good thing, as helping the organization. I’m going to believe them, and I’m going to be friends with them. I’m just going to do my best with this group. And like I said, some people — 

Morgan Friedman: Susie, yes, she’s a ladder-climber.

Sira Laurel: Yes. No, exactly. Opportunist. I had a girlfriend — again, I’ll rename her — I’ll call her Chris. So Chris and I really gelled, we really jived, and she was the one telling me all this stuff that was being said in the after-hours, the lunch breaks, the water-cooler moments. She had told me, “Yeah, Susie said you’re an opportunist.” And I let her know, “What is wrong with being an opportunist? She’s trying to better herself. Sounds like a leader to me. What is wrong?” So I was really grateful to have somebody in my peer group who could see me for me and wasn’t trying to tear me down. But there was a weird dynamic where the billing side, the back-office side of the house, wanted to just hate the salespeople, wanted to hate executives, and created this us-versus-them dynamic that didn’t need to exist, that I didn’t see as necessary and certainly didn’t want to participate in, because I saw it as self-sabotage. It’s like, why would I want to stay put and stagnate and be one thing? I want to continue to grow.

Morgan Friedman: I’m so excited to get to your story. Before we get into the story, I want to make one final observation, because I find this general topic of office politics, stepping back from it, so interesting. I just want to observe — part of the pain of office politics, in addition to the obvious, that it stops productivity, it wears you down — in addition to all that, it’s so often because of the silliest and stupidest reasons. “No, this person once said something not nice enough to me, so now, for the next eight years in this job, he’s the bad guy.” It’s like minor grudges just escalate and escalate, and it’s incredible.

Sira Laurel: Yes, exactly. Because I didn’t show up with whatever expectation that person had for — I don’t know — a younger person, a female, who knows what — they had an expectation of how somebody in my position should show up to this organization and behave, and I didn’t meet that expectation. And so it was internalized, personalized.

Morgan Friedman: And without thinking about what someone’s actual intent is — it’s not that you didn’t meet the expectation, it’s that you didn’t meet the unspoken, secret expectation that you had no way to know, and therefore you’re screwed forever, forevermore, because you didn’t live up to the secret expectation.

Sira Laurel: Yes, exactly. Invisible rules that nobody told me I was playing, or needed to play, to survive. Right. So that was the introduction.

So that’s my first couple of years getting in the mix of the corporate world and learning what the dynamics were, just on my own — nobody’s teaching you these things, they’re just happening to you. And I’m forming relationships with my external team, the sales folks, and my internal leadership team. Man, we cycled through managers, though — I mean, like once a year. It was ridiculous. And ultimately I ended up managing the practice. I was promoted into an assistant manager position, but then that manager ended up burning out, couldn’t bridge the two groups, and I was promoted into the management position. So all of a sudden I was managing people who I had learned from in my first year there, who were still there — Susie was still there, and now—

Morgan Friedman: Sounds like a true opportunist to me.

Sira Laurel: Yeah. So, let’s see — what’s happening now. I’m working hard, I’m playing hard. We’ve moved into a new office, we’ve built a bar inside the boardroom, we have company cars, and it’s an exciting time to be working in this organization. I’ve done my best to quiet the noise of the remaining staff — we cycled through some folks, and not everybody who was there at the beginning was still there, but we had some folks who were lifers. So people I was initially learning from were now reporting to me, and I was trying to make that as fair and equitable and as responsible as I could, and as non-emotional as I could about it — again, having to teach myself how to lead, with leaders who basically just said, “Ignore it,” or “Don’t worry about it.” That was my leadership advice from people who had been there before. I then ultimately ended up going into HR, because I couldn’t ignore the people side of things and emotions — but we’ll get there. Yeah, we’re living it up, we’re going out, we’re having a great time, and as I ascend in responsibility, I’m also getting more and more behind the curtain of my leadership group. And I start learning that it’s not just a work-hard, play-hard environment — it’s really a “Mad Men” environment, and people are having affairs. They’re going on jets to Las Vegas — what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, that type of stuff. And I’m just trying to ignore that, trying to still stay focused on building this business, making sure we’re solvent, managing the revenue cycle, keeping the team educated, making sure everybody’s in their role playing their part. And we’re having a good run of months, and I’m trying to ignore all that junk, and I’m getting closer to my CFO. He’s been a really great mentor to me this entire time, and it’s been a safe space, and we’ve been able to develop a relationship where we’ve even been able to challenge each other in areas of needed growth — that kind of relationship where the power dynamic exists, and there’s respect for that, and if there’s going to be a deciding factor, like, I’m going to provide my evidence and my support for how I think something should be, but he’s going to be the tiebreaker. I know that in that relationship. But he respected everything that I’d done, and worked at, and how I’d excelled and built my knowledge, skills, and abilities in this environment to be an excellent contributor, team player, leader, et cetera. So it was an incredible partnership, really — the kind of which I have yet to recreate in any of my internal roles thereafter.

Morgan Friedman: I just want to add a footnote to that, which is — I think one of the most underrated aspects of a successful career on the corporate ladder is having a good mentor. I’ve known too many people who are naturally talented, smart, hardworking people, but they had the bad luck of having a bad boss in their first job, then their second job, then their third job, and by the time they’re thirty-three years old, they’re burnt out, even though they had potential. While, on the other hand, I’ve known people who just had the luck of having a great mentor who could hold their hand, guide them, and they’ve gone on to do incredible things.

Sira Laurel: Yes. Yeah, having that made it possible for me to know what good management and mentorship should look like, so that even if it didn’t show up, I still knew that, okay, that’s not it, and to set boundaries for myself better — to find the flexibility and the framework that was offered to me. But I always knew what I was looking for, even if I didn’t get it. I could get as close as I could with whatever manager relationship I had, and to also find others, whoever they were in the organization, that I could pair up with, who presented themselves in that kind of way, where we could be thought partners together — to find executive sponsors, even if they weren’t my direct manager. And certainly to offer that, as I became a people manager, to my direct reports. I knew what I was looking for, and I knew what to be. And so I’ve had great relationships with folks I’ve managed, who I’ve stayed connected with over the years, even though we’re no longer working for the same company. And I feel really proud of what I’ve been able to learn, and then adapt, adopt, and offer.

Morgan Friedman: By the way, I really like the way you said it a moment ago — that you learned from him what great management looks like. I might steal that phrase, because for people who never learn what it looks like — if they’ve only had a boss who screams at them and micromanages them, then that’s just how the world works to them. Kind of like when you’re a kid, when you’re thirteen years old, the way your parents are, you just think that’s the normal world. And there’s this early-career parallel to that.

Sira Laurel: Absolutely. Yeah, the leadership-direct-report relationship is akin to the parent-child relationship. It absolutely is, and it’s the responsibility of leaders, after you exit your family system, to offer the ideal— organizational system.

Morgan Friedman: One hundred percent, I agree. So you had this great mentor in the CFO.

Sira Laurel: Yes. He was the ground for me through all this weirdness happening around me — resting-face comments, being called an opportunist, nice to my face but mean behind my back, all this weird stuff. And then I’m getting more behind the curtain of the leadership team — we’re going to Vegas, we’re having affairs, we’re doing weird stuff, we’re even doing little gray-area stuff with billing that I have to stop us from doing. “No, no, no, President, we’re not going to do that, we’re not going to tack on this billing code to this product — do we even know the patient got it?” Just all this stuff that I’m combating, and my through-line, the ground, is this mentor — until I’m told by a salesperson, who the three of us used to go out together all the time, that there’s this weird energy in the office as I get in. There’s something odd that I can feel — again, I notice when there’s a shift.

Morgan Friedman: In general or do you mean one particular day you walked in?

Sira Laurel: One particular day I walk in and there’s an energy shift.

Morgan Friedman: An energy shift, okay.

Sira Laurel: And I knew that he had gone out, and I hadn’t, and that he and the salesperson were out at this restaurant-bar that we used to go to all the time. And I remember taking off, and then the next day I was just like, something has changed. And the salesperson walked in, and I’m like, “Hey—”

Morgan Friedman: But I just want to make another footnote comment — I’m a logic-and-math sort of guy, but even though I’m a by-the-numbers, non-spiritual guy, energy shifts are real. You can totally feel it, even though everything is technically the same and everything looks the same, everyone has the same smile — you can feel it in some way. I don’t quite understand how it works.

Sira Laurel: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Absolutely, yes. So we frequented this place, there was a waitress there who we always used to joke around with, and then one day my CFO wasn’t in the office, and I was like, that’s odd — he and I were always there early, early. And the salesperson comes through, and I’m like, “What’s going on? What’s happened? I know something has happened — what has happened?” And she’s like, “Oh — you’ve got to tell me.” And he’s like, “Yeah, so-and-so from this place — his wife found out that they had an affair, they slept together.”

Morgan Friedman: The CFO.

Sira Laurel: The CFO.

Morgan Friedman: I see. So the mentor who you had held up on a pedestal—

Sira Laurel: Yeah, who was tethering me to the ground in this Mad Men environment, where I had remained safe, in my own way, from all of this. I was still working hard, playing hard, but I felt like I was in this container with him, that we were just business-oriented, and yeah, we’d go out late, but we were talking about work and philosophizing and figuring things out and architecting the universe together. We were challenging each other, we’d spar, and it was beautiful, and we were growing. And I was like, okay, at least there’s this one person here who is centered, who is grounded, who is not getting caught up in this stupid stuff, this world crumbling. And then everything changed. Everything changed. It’s like the rose-colored glasses came off — it’s as if I could see everything for what it was. And he and I had a serious conversation about it. And he knew.

Morgan Friedman: So you had a serious conversation with him about it?

Sira Laurel: Yeah.

Morgan Friedman: Did you initiate the conversation, or did he initiate the conversation?

Sira Laurel: I went into his office the next day, when he came back, and I just shut the door, and I said, “Hello.”

Morgan Friedman: By the way, I just want to commend you for that — this is a lesson I often share and teach, which is, I think a lot of people in the boss-report relationship think, “No, I’m the report, I have to wait for the boss to start the hard conversations.” But the good employees, the good reports, go to the boss and initiate the hard conversations, like you did. So that’s a sign that you’re a good employee.

Sira Laurel: Thank you. Yes — I really didn’t learn that there was a repercussion for starting a hard conversation until my next place of employment. I thought that was just what you could do, that we were all humans, we all had roles to play. I didn’t realize that there could be repercussions for starting a hard conversation with a superior — not until later, because that wasn’t the environment I was in.

Morgan Friedman: That was it. 

Sira Laurel: And I think I actually came out of the womb thinking that I was already an adult, in control, comfortable talking with anybody and everybody. And that I just didn’t get, or I guess didn’t respond to, power and violence, in that kind of way. I wasn’t willing to submit — perhaps another story for another day.

Morgan Friedman: So tell us about the conversation.

Sira Laurel: Yes. So his whole body was just — I mean, I saw a weaker man. I saw someone who definitely felt guilt and shame, and knew, and said as much — that he knew that if I found out, it would change our relationship, that it would come off as a betrayal to me. And he apologized to me. And it did — even though I very much appreciated that there was no going back. I tried, and we continued working together for another couple of years, and I thought I compartmentalized it. I think I did a pretty good job of doing that, and just continued focusing on the business.

Morgan Friedman: By the way, my literary-nerd side remembers — when you say that, it reminds me of Shakespeare’s ninety-fourth sonnet. I’ve loved it since I first read it in high school — it’s actually my favorite sonnet. And the last two lines are: “For sweetest things turn sourest by their deeds; lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds.” And — “lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds” — it’s a very powerful line. In other words, if something is bad, it’s bad, but what’s even worse than something that’s bad is something that was previously great and then became bad — it goes bad because you’ve seen how beautiful the lily is, you’ve seen how great it could be, as opposed to weeds, where your expectation from the first instant is, it’s just a weed, so you ignore it, you don’t expect the weed to be the lily. So that makes this kind of falling situation, in many ways, much harder than a boss who is just terrible from day one. The boss is terrible from day one — that’s just how he is, and you either deal with it or you quit.

.

Sira Laurel: Exactly. Yep. So that thing happens — okay, it is what it is, it’s a one-time thing, it’s his relationship, his wife — people make mistakes. I’m going through my own grief process with this, and we move on. I move on, and back to work we go. And then the manager leaves, and we bring in the COO, who was a one-percent owner of this corporation, and was a total meathead. So just when I think this is done, this has passed, okay, great, we can just move on and keep going — they bring in this meathead, who lightly sexually harasses me and other people in the office. And what I mean by that is — he’ll come up and rub your shoulders. 

Morgan Friedman: Like he’d come up to you randomly and rub your shoulders.

Sira Laurel: Yeah, so you’re in a doorway, and you’d be like, “What’s up, how’s it going?” And it’d be brief, but there’d be a shoulder rub. You’re like, “Thanks—”

I’ll also rename him Joe.

Morgan Friedman: Joe. Yeah. Joe only shoulder-rubbed the girls, not the guys.

Sira Laurel: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I was trying to think, did he do this to the salespeople? I’m pretty sure he didn’t.

Morgan Friedman: The lead salesman, who was a former fat boy, surely would have punched him. 

Sira Laurel: And we all used to joke about it, because — again, this is my first introduction to corporate America, I don’t really know what sexual harassment is and what isn’t. There are some pretty obvious signs of what you’d think of as sexual harassment — the really egregious stuff, not just a shoulder rub, “Hey, I’m just a nice guy, come on, I’m just Joe, the happy guy who comes and gives shoulder rubs, I’m just being nice, I’m just being Joe.” That’s just Joe, right — that’s just whomever. And we’d talk about it — we were on the phone, I was always on the phone with the salesperson about their patient, the billing, whatever — and we’re talking like, “Oh yeah, Joe’s such a weirdo, he’s so lame, he’s such an idiot,” and so on. And so there was just this normalization happening. And I’m not in HR at this time — my mind is managing the revenue cycle, but I’m also thinking, this is kind of weird, and why isn’t our supposed HR person doing anything about this? But he’s also the boss now, the COO, the one-percent owner, now managing us — so there’s this power-dynamic, weird stuff happening, and you’re like, what is really possible here, what is happening, for me to say something about this? And then there’d be something else — we had a sit-down desk, I’m in my office, and he’d come and sit down next to me, and his hand would be on the tabletop, and his fingertips would just barely touch the top of your leg under the table — sitting down at the tabletop, and just barely grazing your leg, while he’s looking at a spreadsheet, getting into the numbers with you. This person definitely doesn’t need to be this close. So it started increasing, where you started to notice, this is definitely not okay. The shoulder rub was like, okay, maybe he’s rubbing everybody’s shoulders, or, oh, there’s the joke he made about all the girls he used to get in high school — okay, that’s just, I’m in a room with all the boys, just boys talking, like I’m in the locker room, what do I expect, to hear locker-room talk? Okay, well, now we’re sitting down in my office, he’s in my space, his hand is grazing my leg — okay, we are progressing in terms of behavior.

Morgan Friedman: By the way, I just want to make a quick comment on the progression. Something I’ve seen a lot — I’ve known too many people who are such good people, and here’s the problem: good people, in my experience, think everyone else is good. Because of that, I’ve known so many good people who, when these exact sorts of things happen, it’s always, “No, no, no, he was just holding his hand, there’s just a millimeter of difference between his hand and your leg, no, it didn’t really touch” — everything has this sort of plausible deniability to it. And by the way, this guy does it on purpose, so there’s plausible deniability built in, and then the good people around you are like, “Just say, no, no, no, plausible deniability, nothing bad happened.” I’ve been in situations where people are stealing so much money, and I’ve known too many good people who just buy the bullshit excuse for everything — if they don’t literally see someone taking cash out of a bank vault and walking out, they’re just not going to believe that some people just do bad things.

Sira Laurel: Yeah, exactly. And this is why I literally shifted my career into human resources and employee relations and the people side of organizations — because of this experience, because there was nobody there who was an advocate. We weren’t getting training. We were all doing the best we knew how, in my first career role out of college, where we also weren’t taught anything about this. So, is a look down at your shirt and back up okay? Does it have to happen so many times before it’s not okay? Is it the millimeter of difference — how close does it have to be to your thigh before it’s a problem? How close does a face have to be? How many jokes have to be told before it’s a problem? There were all sorts of new things I just had no idea were necessarily problems, until my body was telling me there were problems, because I was getting sick, because I was losing sleep — I could feel it more, but the logic part was still overriding that sensory experience. And it didn’t seem to be anybody else’s experience either — it was just, “He’s a weirdo,” but we were in a male-dominated industry, so it was just what a guy thinks about another guy — that he’s just kind of weird. They’re not getting sexually harassed.

Sira Laurel: So yeah, let’s see, so that’s happening, my mental health is crashing, I’m still going to work every day, I’m still showing up, morning to night, work, still going out — and my CFO and I had made it to this point where we’re doing okay, but I’m telling him about Joe, and he’s just like, “He’s gross,” again.

Morgan Friedman: Okay, so you’re telling the CFO — at this point things are improving, you’re recovering from the discovery, and you tell him about Joe?

Sira Laurel: Yeah, exactly. So time has passed, we’re kind of back in a groove — I mean, it is different, but we’re back in a groove. And yeah, the COO was brought in to manage the office, and he’s not just terrible at his job, he’s also a predator. And I’m figuring this out as I’m moving along, and my mental health, my physical health, is starting to tank. The problem with the office “betties,” as I used to call them, was long gone, in terms of — the problems were much bigger now, in which I’m not realizing that I’m heading towards burnout, because I’ve never experienced that before. Again, nobody tells you these things and what that feels like.

Morgan Friedman: How old are you at this point?

Sira Laurel: So let’s see — I graduated at twenty. So, twenty-six.

Morgan Friedman: Okay, burnout — you’re a fast learner.

Sira Laurel: Yeah.

Morgan Friedman: I found burnout tends to happen more commonly in the mid-thirties, but you’re already good at pattern-matching, you’re already seeing the patterns, and it’s difficult.

Sira Laurel: Yeah. So I recognize these things are happening, I don’t know that it’s burnout, but I do know that I’m exhausted, I’m tanking, I’m heading in a bad way. But I’m still going out, I am still working hard, playing hard, and I’m doing the same coping mechanism that I was using to handle the gossip, to handle the weird things people were saying about me, to get over that — I was still going out. And yes, I went out with my CFO, and we were drinking hard, and we’d gone to dinner — we worked at the office, always carried, always had whiskey in the drawer, so we drank there, then we go to dinner, drank there, and he was really, really drunk. And he just started saying things to me, about how pretty I was, how attractive I was, and I was like, what is happening? So the thread that I had attached to the ground — that’s how thin it is at this point. I’m just starting to feel really floaty, in space, like I don’t know who I am or what is going on anymore. And yet — we’re building a business, we’re succeeding, we’re building more than we ever have, we’ve got a larger team, it’s amazing how you can succeed and fail at the same time. So this — I’m being hit on by my CFO, and ultimately he puts a hand on me.

Morgan Friedman: This time with less than a millimeter of space.

Sira Laurel: Indeed. And I was like, “What are you doing?” And — in talking with women, hearing other women’s stories — there’s a slowing-down of time while these things are happening.

Morgan Friedman: That’s interesting. I’ve never identified as a woman, so I’ve never experienced that there’s a slowing-down of time.

Sira Laurel: Yeah, that I experience, and I’ve talked to so many women who say the same thing — there’s a slowing-down of time and a feeling of being frozen, and that’s partly a fight-or-freeze response that’s getting triggered. But for me — my survival mechanism has always been to fight, but that’s with strangers, with people I don’t know that well, or friends. But when you get into a trusting relationship, that went away for me, and I froze — that was my response instead, which was very interesting. And again, it was slowing down — every movement, everything he was saying, and I was going in my head, like, how is this happening, I can’t believe it, and I started to just separate from myself, like my body and my mind felt like they were separating.

Morgan Friedman: You prefaced this part of the story by saying you were drinking heavily. How sober were you at this time? You’re describing separating from yourself, time slowing down.

Sira Laurel: I mean, yeah, I felt completely coherent and sharp, and I was not drinking as much as he was, but we were drinking.

Morgan Friedman: I see. So it’s like, you’re drunk, but it’s the equivalent of a splash of cold water that wakes you up, and you’re like, what the heck is happening?

Sira Laurel: Yeah, but that’s obviously — it’s a depressant, it slows down your reactions when you’re on alcohol. So while I feel sharp — am I sharp? No, it’s just — I narrowed in, all senses were just tuned into this experience and how insane it was. And the disappointment, all the stuff that had been happening with the COO, my entire experience over these years, was all then coming up too — everything I had smooshed down, telling myself it’s fine, it’s fine, keep moving on, it was all coming out inside, as this was happening. And yeah, so — I feel like I could have stepped away, not let the hand go to my leg, and I could have stopped it earlier, but at the same time. It’s like watching a train wreck — your own train wreck. It’s like I couldn’t keep my eyes off of what was going to happen, what was going to happen next. It was such an out-of-body experience. And yeah, so — that just broke me. That completely broke me.

Morgan Friedman: Well — to finish that night — he put a hand on your leg and then — feel free to not reveal more, I don’t want to make you uncomfortable.

Sira Laurel: Yeah, yeah, but — well, anything additional was put to a stop.

Morgan Friedman: Okay. Yeah, understood, understood.

Sira Laurel: Yeah, we put it to a stop. But he couldn’t drive either. And this is me at the time, going, what do I do about this person? I’m thinking, this is horrific, and I’m also thinking, this is my friend, this is somebody I trust, this is somebody who, despite doing this, I feel responsible for, and I should drive him home. And that’s what happened — which is just this insane thing happening inside your head, where this person is a horrible person, but they’re also my friend, and I’ve known them for so — your brain is just going haywire. My brain was going all over the place.

Morgan Friedman: Wow.

Sira Laurel: Yeah, so that felt gross too — like I should have just — not “should have,” because I’m definitely not shaming myself, but that’s the thoughts going through your head at the time. It’s like, I could have left him there, I should have left him there, what was I thinking — all that stuff absolutely happened. Yeah. Because nothing happened — he just went back to work as if nothing happened.

Morgan Friedman: So tell us about the next day in the office.

Sira Laurel: Yeah, so we just go to work, because it’s a weekday, and that’s what we did. No matter how hard we played, we still showed up to work. So yeah, I go to work, it’s not like I called in sick, he didn’t call in sick, we’re going to the office, we’re working together. We didn’t chat like normal.

Morgan Friedman: But did you start the hard conversation with him, like you did with the previous incident?

Sira Laurel: No, I was broken. I was so emotionally, physically, mentally, spiritually broken — my community, even, I would say, in terms of my tribe like it that was shattered, completely shattered. And everything having to do with my well-being was gone, and no, I didn’t have the strength to have that conversation. I worked for a few more weeks, and the COO was still being a weirdo — that is my unofficial term for being a predator, continuously sexually harassing — and I had my casual-conversation hat on with my director of HR. It was summertime then, starting to get nice, and I had a girlfriend who had worked there for a short time — that’s how we met, and then she got a different role elsewhere, and we became really good friends — and we were sitting on her front lawn, we had a couple of chairs and glasses of wine, and I was telling her everything that was happening, and that I couldn’t be there anymore. And she was just really deeply listening, being a great friend, and like, “What are you going to do?” And while all of this crap was happening — and there were successes too — I’d been sent on a business trip, I’d been introduced to the world of consulting, and was really interested in organizational development, this terminology I was starting to learn about, as I was googling things and figuring out what I wanted to do in my career and how I wanted to continue to ascend in this company, and what I would need to learn to do that.

Morgan Friedman: You’re revealing your age — a younger version of yourself would have said “I started Chat-GPT-ing it.”

Sira Laurel: Yeah, yeah, yeah, all these new words. Totally, yep, exactly. No, I took to Google, the tool we had at the time. And yeah, I was like, what do you have to be, what do you have to do, to be a consultant, what education does that require, do I have to go to grad school, what’s the program, do I do an MBA? And I found this — organizational psychology, organizational development, organizational behavior — I was like, that is it, that’s the thing, it’s the qualitative side of business that I want to focus on. I want to be the confidential resource I never had. I want to create the employee experience I would have always wanted. That’s what I need to do. And I was also looking up, what do I do about sexual harassment? I was researching all these things, and I told my girlfriend, on the front lawn, summertime, hanging out, and she’s like, “What are you going to do?” And it’s like, I’m going to go to the CEO, I’m going to tell him everything that’s happened, because I have an incredible amount of detail, a long timetable of things that have happened to me at this firm — names, dates, times, et cetera — that I will convey the seriousness of the situation, and I will get a severance, and I will leave, and it will fund my way to San Francisco, where I will enroll in this grad program, and I will start a new life, and I will pivot into HR. She was just like, hell yeah, go do that. That’s what I did.

Morgan Friedman: And that plan worked, it played out. 

Sira Laurel: Yeah,

Morgan Friedman: That is a problem-solving mentality at its best, and you’re able to do the best version of the consultant, which is to look at yourself, as an outsider, and say, what would I advise myself to do, and leave — but not just leave, but leave in the smart way, so you can get some money, and invest that money in what you actually wanted to do. So congrats on turning the lemons into lemonade.

Sira Laurel: Mm-hmm. Yeah. In the next ten years, I spent my time protecting people from bad actors.

Morgan Friedman: People like the CFO type.

Sira Laurel: Yeah, the COO type.

Morgan Friedman: Yeah.

Sira Laurel: Protecting people from CEOs, protecting people from peers, protecting people from whoever — just creating systems that were equitable and in service of humans, that set really clear guardrails. I think humans are better with them. Setting really clear expectations for what behavior was expected and rewarded, and holding people accountable.

Morgan Friedman: Question — if you had the magical ability to whisper in the ear of the version of you that first started seeing the early signs — if we go back half an hour in the story — what advice would you have given yourself?

Sira Laurel: This is not about you.

Morgan Friedman: Interesting, interesting.

Sira Laurel: This is not because of you. This is not your fault.

Morgan Friedman: That’s interesting and powerful. I can imagine that when these sorts of things happen, there’s this natural tendency, especially among good people, to blame themselves — “I brought it on myself” — and it just requires maturity and experience to realize that most of the time, you did nothing wrong, there are just bad people out there.

Sira Laurel: Yeah, exactly. And it’s not that — it’s not because I went out after work that it’s my fault this happened. It’s not because I put myself in that boardroom. It’s not because I got onto this leadership team. I’m allowed to be there. I was the only woman there, and these things can happen when there is no behavioral standard for how you treat people. But it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t show up. I had a girlfriend who was sexually harassed at her dream company, and I had another girlfriend who asked, “Well, what was she doing there, at the happy hour?” And I was like, what are you talking about? She was going out with her team — that’s what she was doing, it’s her first month of employment, she’s obviously going to go out and hang out at the happy hour, she’s showing her face, she’s being a team player, she’s building relationships. Yeah. Well, people get drunk and they do dumb things.

We’re like, what? No, no, no — that is a failure of leadership, that is not a failure of this human who was victimized at this event.

Morgan Friedman: Yeah. By the way, I think there’s an interesting and subtle point here, which is, because all humans are — no human acts one hundred percent perfectly, it’s just impossible — so what I’ve found is, in every situation, because no one acts one hundred percent perfectly, outside observers, wanting to be fair, tend to want to find fault on both sides. “Well, you did this, but he did that,” because that’s how people on the outside feel fair and feel non-judgmental. And this gets complex, because while that’s often true, there’s this key, subtle point that — okay, even if both sides messed up, it’s 99.99999% on this side and 0.000001% on this side. So it’s literally a hundred thousand times more severe, this person’s mistake, than this person’s mistake. Said differently, I think it’s hard for humans to understand proportionality, and especially proportionality in blame — where, this person insults and starts a fistfight, and hits, and all this — and then the other person says, “Well, you didn’t — you gave me this angry look.” I’m like, okay, maybe you shouldn’t have given an angry look, but the other person is just so much objectively worse — and from the outside, “Well, you did this, and he did this” — being human is complex and harmon.

Sira Laurel: And harmful. It certainly is. And when we’re talking about sexual harassment, and you’re talking about a woman not being able to show up to a team happy hour, because there’s a man there who doesn’t know that it’s not okay to touch you, that is not a proportional case.

Morgan Friedman: No. 

And on top of that, the management team knows that and looks the other way.

Sira Laurel: Yes, Yeah, exactly. Or, in my case, that I’m not allowed to go to dinners with our entire male leadership team because they don’t know how to behave, so I have to stay out of that room. That’s not me messing up — that’s a failure, a societal failure. That’s an organizational leadership and behavioral-standard failure.

Morgan Friedman: One hundred percent. It’s interesting you mentioned, in the beginning, the show “Mad Men,” where this sort of behavior is normalized, and there’s just this perspective a lot of people have — that’s how things were back in the 1960s, the swinging sixties, everyone was a swinger, and now 60 years ago —No, It’s like another lifetime, the sixties were closer to World War Two than they are to now. And I feel like a lot of people I know don’t realize that this sort of culture is still thriving in the 2020s.

Sira Laurel: Yes. Yeah, that, unfortunately, wasn’t the last time I was sexually harassed, and I wasn’t even in HR then. My next ten years was spent directly in HR, which is even more insane to me — I’m literally making the rules at the organization about what’s okay and not okay, and yeah, it still happens, very much still a thing. A girlfriend I mentioned — this was just earlier this year — joined a team at a massive, very well-known tech organization, went to a happy hour, team happy hour, somebody slapped her butt, told somebody on the team, “I’m going to sleep with that person before the end of the night.” It’s insane. And this is definitely a company that has a lot of governance and structure, and they definitely have sexual-harassment training every year for managers, and we’ve already had the MeToo movement, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So yeah, still very much a problem inside corporate environments — not all of them, but—

Morgan Friedman: So, slightly off topic from Client Horror Stories, but building on what you just said — these are subjects I know nothing about — how, if you were a policymaker, if you were the CEO of some huge, important tech company, what would you do to eliminate this sort of problem? Because, again, as a total outsider, knowing nothing about this — and this might be naive — it’s unclear to me if sexual-harassment training will actually change anyone’s behavior. The people I know who are bad people, who’ve done inappropriate things like this — they would sit in a sexual-harassment training and roll their eyes and not even pay attention. So to me, that doesn’t feel like an effective way to curb the behavior. So what are the sorts of things you think should be done?

Sira Laurel: Purpose of an organization has to have a humanist core. It has to be rooted in diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility. That’s a value system that needs to be ingrained top, bottom, side to side. And you can instill those values into the governance of your organization. You can create reward and recognition systems that reinforce the behavior you want to see. The coherence — making sure that’s sticky, and people understand that as part of your internal-comms strategy. The manager training that you offer, again, top, bottom, side to side. The education you’re providing to your people, that needs to be recurrent — it’s not a one-time annual training. When you aim for the floor of compliance, you hit the floor.

Morgan Friedman: I like that, I like that point.

Sira Laurel: So the bar needs to be high. And if you’re going to hire by your values — which a lot of companies do, they ask people in an interview process which one of our values sticks out to you and why—I see that all the time in applications. I’ve designed it into our applications — you need to fire by your values too. And that’s where organizations get stuck, because they don’t end up walking the talk. 

Morgan Friedman: Right. If someone behaves badly in these sorts of ways, or worse, but they’re a high performer dude, he’s a salesman who brought in twenty million dollars last year — like, you’re doing all that you can to make sure you don’t fire this salesman who brings in twenty million dollars a year.

Sira Laurel: Yep, yes, exactly — without thinking. And this is where the systems thinking comes into play — if that doesn’t come naturally, you have to develop it. We’re not thinking about the first, second, third-order effects of the decisions we make. And while it’s initially maybe difficult to understand those longer-term effects in terms of dollars, keeping the competent jerk — keeping the salesperson who’s a predator — rots that team and that culture, slowly but surely, over time, so that people are not giving you their best. They’re taking leaves of absence for burnout, for the cognitive dissonance at least. You’re not leading by example, and that culture lives and dies at the top.

Morgan Friedman: I agree, culture lives and dies at the top. And in my experience, more broadly, it’s impossible to get anything important done without executive buy-in. Yeah. And if there isn’t executive-team buy-in to firing by your values, it’s just not going to happen.

Sira Laurel: Yeah, yeah. And I think that’s responsible for most of the corporate rot that we see inside organizations today, and why we have a massive burnout problem, and a mental-health problem, and people are disengaged — and if we were in an economy where people could leave, they would. But instead, they’re quiet-quitting, and they’re quiet-crumbling, and they’re disengaging, and they’re giving you mediocre results, and they’re not engaging in the change initiatives — like AI is obviously a massive one for a lot of organizations, and maybe they’re afraid, and they just don’t care, because why would they be loyal to an entity that has shown them no loyalty?

Sira Laurel: Just thinking out loud, riffing on this for a second — I wonder how much of this is related to an increasing change from a long-term mindset to a short-term mindset, because — just thinking through it — okay, how does this change really happen, and we agree that the change has to happen from the top — but when I think about that, the problem is, most CEOs I know, very successful ones, are thinking about next quarter, and not that much further past one, two, three, four quarters from now, at most. And that short-term thinking basically has to leak into — “I just need the profits to stay up this quarter, so I’m not firing the twenty-million-dollar-a-year sales guy.” While, on the other hand, it feels to me that a few decades ago, the thinking was much more long-term, and long-term thinking goes to exactly the points you’re making — “How do I make the company massively more profitable in twenty years than it is now? Let’s have a healthy culture, let’s avoid burnout, let’s avoid this terrible, illegal behavior.” So to me, there seems to be a parallel, or perhaps a causal factor, or perhaps a correlation, to the increasing short-termness of everything that’s happening.

Morgan Friedman: Yes. And those financial gravitational pulls — they’re heavy, they’re huge. That private equity, your VCs, are like, “Move fast, break everything to get there, and we’re throwing all this money at you to do that.” And we’re building for liquidation, not longevity. And there are examples of companies that don’t do that — like Walmart. The reason it’s even named Walmart is because of FedMart, and that organization actually had, in its governance, purpose and integrity and coherence and compliance, to protect it from shareholders eating the golden goose — it paid above-market wages, had a cap on margins, and a number of other stability factors that were encoded into its DNA. And that founder — when the shareholders — the story is that they literally shut him out of his office, they fired him without telling him, because he wasn’t doing what they wanted to do, and ultimately it dissolved within about eighteen months after that. But then he, and another employee on the leadership team, who was completely disgusted by that, went and founded Costco — and Costco has transcended this mutant-capitalism mechanism and framework and model. When African-Americans walk into an organization, into Costco, because of how committed they were to retaining DEI policies despite federal headwinds — what more is there to say, how incredible you are.

Sira Laurel: I didn’t know that detail, but that’s an incredible fact. And Patagonia is another one that transcended the nonprofit-for-profit space, and all the benefit corporations out there that have adopted a taxonomy that incorporates the environment, sustainability, and governance, encoded into their organizations. Again, they’re designing themselves for longevity — they’re going to be around for fifty years, a hundred years, or more, not five years and getting sold to the highest bidder, just for that CEO to start another company and do the same thing again, just churn. And yeah, that short-term thinking is pervasive, it’s rewarded, heavily rewarded. And the CEO who doesn’t care about that grew up in an environment that doesn’t care about that — so it’s being nurtured, that type of thinking. But there are examples, and it’s a slower and steadier, but still consistent, ultimately stronger, set of examples that we have in these other organizations, that will stand the test of time and set examples for younger founders — and the ones, like me, who didn’t want to be a CEO, I wanted to be in service of a CEO, and so I took my chronic institutional betrayal and turned it into something different and better that could help. And I see that happening in younger founders who are working for startups, seeing their founders compete for funding just to compete for funding, even though that’s broken, that system’s broken — “I don’t want to do that, this is wrong, I’m going to do it this way.” And they’re going to find a company built on that kind of intentionality, and they’re going to have those gravitational forces. It’s going to be hard, but you can do it. We have plenty of examples that show young people today that you can do it differently and succeed. But you do have to think long-term, and keep your focus on that mission and that North Star vision.

Morgan Friedman: Powerful words, and those are also the perfect words to end our podcast on. We covered a lot of ground, a very powerful, intense story, so many insights, different directions, different sorts of brainstorming. It’s been a lot of fun. Thank you for coming, Sira.

Sira Laurel: Absolutely, thank you for having me, this was great.

Morgan Friedman: And everyone who’s watched and made it to the end, thank you for staying on. And we hope that you both enjoyed it and learned as much as we did. And until next time.