Since I started volunteering at a senior-living community, I have found myself negotiating with my own mind about waiting. I like to arrive at least twenty minutes early. I set up my computer, connect the screen, arrange whatever I have brought, and get myself situated. People tend to arrive five or ten minutes late. That can leave half an hour when I am ready and almost no one else is.
I open my laptop and pretend to work. I may actually be working, but that is not why I need the computer. I need something to do while watching the door.
What if nobody comes? How long do I sit there? Do I say hello to residents nearby who seem to be enjoying themselves? Do I find the program director and ask whether anyone is planning to come? My mind can manufacture an impressive number of worst-case scenarios out of an empty room.
This feeling is familiar. During my first week as a McKinsey summer associate in 2012, we finished orientation and waited to be staffed. One by one, the professional-development manager would take people out of the meeting room and tell them about their first summer project. You watched your peers leave. Then you noticed who was still sitting there, especially when one of those people was you.
The staffer told us they were looking for the best fit, trying to make sure everyone had a first project that would set them up for success. More than ten years later, I know that was probably completely true. Staffing depended on timing, geography, project needs, experience and luck. It did not make waiting feel any better. Someone else had been picked. You were still in the room.
I experienced a much harder version of that waiting after I returned from maternity leave. McKinsey had a ramp-down and ramp-up program for new mothers, meant to create a gentler transition back into consulting. During that period, I talked with a senior colleague I admired enormously. She was an accomplished consultant and leader, but what I remember most from those conversations was something more personal and maternal. She had the quality of someone who could make a younger woman feel that the confusion she was experiencing belonged in the room.
I asked her a question I genuinely could not answer after my daughter was born. There was now this new human being who existed because of me and depended on me. How was I supposed to compare the value of being with her with the value of returning to work? How could those things even be placed on the same scale? She gave me a thoughtful and characteristically organized answer. First, she said, a baby benefits from experiencing different caregivers and different relationships. Second, I had to believe there was something I genuinely loved about my work that pulled me back.
Both made sense. Neither felt convincing to me then.
A few months later, I received a concerns rating. I was also entering the crucial window when associates were expected to develop the momentum to become engagement managers. I needed to demonstrate enough pull from partners and clients to suggest that I could lead engagements and command the willingness to pay associated with an EM.
I had one more chance. Then I waited. For about a month, as I remember it. There wasn't enough pull.
My constraints made the problem unusually difficult. I wanted to stay local in Washington. Some kinds of work were not open to me, and I did not have the conventional international-development background required by some of the clients whose work might otherwise have fit geographically.
One of the people I talked with was a partner I had worked with before, another woman I admired as a consultant, a leader and a mother. At some point I told her, essentially, “You can be brutally honest with me. You don't need to feel bad about declining me. If I'm simply not the right fit for your next project, just tell me.” In retrospect, I may have given her an impossible request. Perhaps it was simply hard for someone who knew me to reduce a complicated situation to yes, I want you or no, I don’t.
When I told her that I was considering going on Search—beginning the process of finding a path outside the firm—she told me that if she were me, she would probably give it more than a month. Again, I waited.
I thought about those memories recently while sitting in an almost empty room at the community. At the end of my first presentation there, I made an awkward call to action. “Is there anyone who would volunteer to meet with me next Friday in the café for a memory portrait session?” Nobody raised a hand. I remember the visual fact of it: a room full of people and no hands in the air.
The program director reassured me afterward that people were still digesting what I had presented. The next week, she introduced me to a resident who had not even been at the presentation. She simply knew that this person was working on something related to memory and suspected that we would have good chemistry. We did.
And then there was another resident. He had been at the presentation. He hadn’t raised his hand either. But after everyone else left, he stayed behind. He introduced himself, told me about his situation and talked with me. Then he started coming to my Friday sessions. Sometimes he had visitors and couldn’t stay, but he would still come by just to say hello. Eventually I created Tuesday sessions specifically for him.
Looking back now, those first conversations have led in quite different directions. One became a collection of paintings, music and literature that we could argue about together. Another led through architectural plans, a family house, a song, and the question of how a life might be encountered through a space. None of that was visible in the moment when nobody raised a hand.
I think this is why the waiting at the community keeps pulling up these older memories. For much of my career, waiting happened inside a system whose boundaries I understood extremely well.
McKinsey gave people extraordinary latitude to take initiative. We were encouraged to be entrepreneurial, build relationships, create new capabilities, find clients and, in the phrase people often used, “build your own McKinsey.” I benefited enormously from that freedom. But it was still a finite space. There was a financial model. There was an organizational playbook. There were staffing needs, utilization, rates, review cycles, promotion windows and a limited universe of projects. However entrepreneurial I became inside it, there were moments when I had to wait for someone else to open a door.
This feels different because I put myself here. Nobody staffed me on this. I decided that I wanted to understand older people and their stories. I contacted the community. I proposed the experiment. I decided what to bring on Friday. When I realized one person might benefit from something different, I created Tuesday.
If I sit there one Friday and nobody comes, there is nothing embarrassing about that. I can come back next week. I can talk to someone in the hallway. I can ask the program director what she noticed. I can change what I show people. I can stop asking for volunteers in front of a room and invite someone individually. I can follow the person who stays behind after everyone else leaves. I can knock on another door.
There are more branches than I can see. That is the part that feels new. The old reflex still appears. I arrive early, the room is empty, and some part of me begins asking what the empty room says about me.
But increasingly I don't have much time to finish the thought. There is too much else to think about. What should I try next?