"I was 38, and the role - which oversaw standards, best practices, and technology for Amazon's 200+ site merchandisers - was the biggest of my life by far, one I'd been thrust into just three months after my arrival in Seattle and at Amazon. I was thrilled (and a bit terrified) by the size of the opportunity, and threw myself into it."
"We accomplished so much that documenting our progress in that weekly email took me hours - and yet in two years, I'd rarely received so much as a "thx" in return. "At Amazon, silence from the top means you're doing a good job," a colleague reminded me, with rueful humor. She was right. But the feedback vacuum made it increasingly difficult to know if I was fulfilling my mandate. Was I moving fast enough?"
"As I stared at my email that day, I thought, None of this actually matters - followed by the sense that I had to keep pushing forward anyway. That if I slowed down even a little, my career would collapse. Later in the parking garage, I stared numbly at the car in front of me when it hit me: Is this what feels like? It was. I just hadn't realized it could happen to me."
At 38, she led Amazon's Global Merchandising team, overseeing standards, best practices, and technology for more than 200 site merchandisers. She built the team three months after arriving in Seattle and managed 18 sizable projects within two years. Despite extensive accomplishments and lengthy weekly progress reports, she received almost no executive feedback, creating a feedback vacuum and growing anxiety about alignment and speed. Personal passions faded as vigilance and the fear of missing urgent emails dominated downtime. She pushed herself and her team harder, convinced that slowing would collapse her career, until a moment revealed that she was experiencing burnout.
Read at Business Insider
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]