CALLAHANTICS

Perhaps it is just that this year has been especially stressful; or that the news has been rampant with killings and mass murders and beheadings and speculation. But I have been more preoccupied during the last couple weeks than I have in a very long time, and it came to a climax today, September 11, 2014. Last night I was watching a movie on cable and my husband and dog were on the floor of our family room sleeping soundly and blissfully resting. I was staring at both and beginning to feel the personal ritual that plays in my head every year feeling more and more intense. In 2001, I awoke in my Midtown apartment near the United Nations on Manhattan's East Side to a phone call from a lovely woman named Michelle who worked with my husband at the time. “Hello?” I said. “Turn on your TV!” she replied. I found the remote and did just that and found MSNBC just in time to see the second plane hit the World Trade Center (WTC). “Hello?” I said again; however the line had gone dead. At ...

I have spent the last ten years living two professional lives simultaneously. The first is working for a federal agency and being branded a pariah. The agency leaders and contemporaries outside of my immediate department valued and appreciated my work and who I was. My immediate department’s fundamental nature was hostile. No matter how much effort I made or how much I created  or  produced, middle management made deliberate choices to devalue the work I did and consciously undermine me professionally to peers, clients and management. Fortunately, the second life I lived concurrently was through voluntarily supporting an agency that has continuously mentored me and trained me and trusted me to develop into the leader, spokesperson and advocate I now am. That may sound like an unlikely combination, but it is primarily caused by the anomaly that effective management implies controlling your team rather than cultivating your team. When a few months ago, I finally got my courag...