CALLAHANTICS

It feels a bit daunting to have reached the quarter-century milestone of September 11. I still occasionally have panic attacks, but they are far rarer than they were in the past. For my nieces and nephews, who are now in college and only know of 9/11from history class, the event feels a bit abstract, but it was very real for me. On September 11, 2001, I awoke from my Midtown apartment near Grand Central Station and the United Nations on Manhattan’s East Side. I received a phone call from a woman named Michelle, who worked with my husband at the time. She told me to turn on the television, and I found MSNBC just in time to see the second plane hit the World Trade Center (WTC). When I tried to respond, the lie went dead. Now wide awake, I realized the terrifying fact that my husband was supposed to be at a meeting inside WTC Tower 1. I tried to call him on his cell phone several times but was unable to reach him. After determining those efforts were futile, I began to debate my next step...

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...