3. Never show weakness
Emotional, physical and intellectual. At work they call me Minja, this was coined by the VP after hearing people call me ‘ninja,’ he said ‘Ninja? No, she’s Minja.’ And so Minja was born. I consider myself to be a huge resource that any of the executives can pull from. They can ask me a question and I will provide them with an answer and three credible sources. I take huge pride in my every day work product and when I put extra effort in a proposal that would bring the company huge amounts of revenue, I basically take it to bed with me at night and wake up with all kinds of ideas to improve our response.
About a month ago, we had the opportunity to propose on a huge project in San Francisco. We don’t have a huge presence in Northern California so in effort to expand our market, we decide to propose on this project. From the day they decided to pursue, I had exactly 10 days to respond to a RFP that was completely new to me. From that day forward, I worked 12 hour days, and when an addenda was issued, extending the deadline another week, I worked five more 12 hour days to create a completely original response.
I knew we had very little chance of being shortlisted, and usually I don’t get emotionally connected to anything I produce, but I couldn’t help but get involved with this one, emotionally involved, that is. I patiently waited for the short list award and finally after about 3 weeks of deliberation, I find out that MY response was disqualified. OMG, DISQUALIFIED!!!! The VP was piiissssseed. I’ve only seen his neck vein pop out a couple times before and never as pronounced as it was that morning.
Being disqualified is like taboo in my position. My job is to prepare a responsive proposal to the requesting authority, and when we are deemed unresponsive, that means I didn’t do my job correctly. I comb through every single request to ensure that I am responding to every single question with more than enough information to show how qualified we are. The job starts with the proposal. When I show how great we are on paper, and we are awarded the project, then it’s up to the company to prove that we go beyond what we proposed.
In the three years I’ve been with the Company, I’ve never been disqualified. Disqualified = total fail. I’ve seen our other coordinator go down burning in flames because he was disqualified from three proposals in a row. Disqualified means you suck. So I took a huge hit when I found out that I was disqualified. I could feel the water welling up in my eyes, and my face turning red from the humiliation. I held my tears back and just said ‘well, we need to find out why we were disqualified… I did my best.’ To that the VP and Principal acknowledged my hard work and told me to set up a debrief.
I schlepped back to my desk completely defeated, my first disqualification. I wanted to cry. I didn’t, but I wanted to. I thought about all the women who had been seen crying at least once, and how their image is completely shattered by showing that emotion, weakness. It became clear to me why women have such a hard time climbing the corporate ladder, it’s because we care too much about things we can’t control. And we cry.
The debrief was set up for the next day. By that time I scoured our response and could not find one thing that I questioned if I responded inaccurately. On the phone we had one representatives from the City of San Francisco and another from the Human Resource Commission. They explained what exactly it was that deemed us unresponsive. We were disqualified due to a technicality. The Principal and Director of DB defended our response to no avail. Just before we hung up, the Principal basically calls them idiots and says that we will be protesting the award of the contract. Then he storms out of the office yelling ‘Socialists!’
We were screwed on a technicality which made me feel better because it wasn’t necessarily anything that I could have known, unless having failed once before. Sometimes I feel like I should have known to interpret the question the way they intended, but in reality, it went beyond the dictation. It was a mistake I had to make.
All of us 20-something career hungry young adults are learning through our failures, JK Rowling says it best in her speech below.
The Fringe Benefits of Failure
