My first job out of college was about as glamorous as it sounds: selling office supplies door-to-door in the Washington, D.C. area. Pens. Paper. Toner. Three-ring binders. If an office needed it, I was the guy knocking on the door trying to sell it.
This was boots-on-the-ground sales. Walk into an office, introduce myself, and hope someone provided me thirty seconds before showing me the door. And there were a lot of doors.
The job taught me how to handle rejection, read a room and appreciate the people who gave me a chance instead of dwelling on the dozens who didn’t. It taught me that the receptionist everyone ignored often knew more about how a company operated than anyone else in the building. Most importantly, it taught me that relationships mattered more than transactions.
It also taught me another skill that never made it onto my résumé:
How to sneak into office buildings.
One particular building in Washington, DC had especially tough security. The front desk guard wasn’t interested in allowing a twenty-something office-supply salesman to wander the hallways looking for prospects. Game on!
I brashly walked into the lobby like I owned the place.
Before the guard could ask where I was headed, I hit the elevator and went down to the basement. Once downstairs, I switched elevators and rode another one back up to the second floor. Mission accomplished.
I stepped onto the second floor, straightened my tie and walked into the first office I saw. Sitting there was the owner—a well-dressed, confident businessman with a distinctly Gordon Gekko look.
Instead of immediately dismissing me, he smiled warmly.
“Make yourself comfortable in my conference room!”
Whoa. Jackpot! No rejection. No slammed door. This guy actually wanted to talk b-i-d-n-e-s-s!
I settled into the conference room and admired my prospective new client. Beautiful office. Swanky furniture. Surely these people went through a lot of toner!
The owner excused himself. Five minutes passed. Then ten. Finally, the conference-room door opened. There stood Gordon Gekko. Next to him was my old friend from the lobby: the security guard. Rut roh!
Apparently, “Make yourself comfortable in my conference room” really meant, “Please remain conveniently in this enclosed space while I summon someone to remove you from the premises.”
Moments later, I was unceremoniously escorted from the building and deposited onto the streets of Washington, DC carrying my briefcase, my wounded pride and exactly zero new office-supply accounts.
The owner had every right to throw me out. I wasn’t supposed to be there. I’d bypassed building security with all the sophistication of a kid sneaking into the second showing at a movie theater. But walking down the sidewalk, one thought stuck with me:
Why didn’t he just tell me?
I wouldn’t have liked it, but at least I would have known where I stood.
Decades later, I still think about that conference room because transparency—or the lack of it—shows up everywhere in our work and personal lives.
We Need to Be Clear
In our work lives, difficult conversations with employees get postponed because they’re uncomfortable. Someone hears they’re “doing great” when they’re not. A boss hears that a project is “on track” when everyone involved knows it’s headed toward a cliff. Budgets, deadlines, performance problems and expectations get softened in the name of kindness or convenience.
Good leaders don’t need to be cruel. They need to be clear. When an employee isn’t meeting expectations, honest feedback provides an opportunity to improve. When a strategy isn’t working, acknowledging reality provides an opportunity to change it. When an organization is struggling, pretending otherwise doesn’t make the struggle disappear.
Transparency doesn’t eliminate adversity. It creates an opportunity to deal with it.
Where Do We Stand?
And the same principle applies in our personal lives.
Some of life’s hardest conversations happen around kitchen tables rather than conference tables. Finances. Relationships. Aging parents. Expectations. Resentments. Mistakes. These conversations often get avoided for the same reason organizations avoid difficult discussions: saying the quiet part out loud can be uncomfortable. But everyone deserves to know where things stand!
Financial problems require looking honestly at the numbers. Struggling relationships require acknowledging what’s wrong. Misaligned expectations need to be put on the table. Transparency doesn’t guarantee a happy ending. But it does something equally important: it establishes reality.
Is the Door Open?
And reality is where resilience begins.
Resilience requires a baseline. Recovery can’t begin until the problem is understood and acknowledged. And transparency is the perfect starting point.
That first sales job taught me the value of every person willing to open a door and give a young salesman a chance. And occasionally, it taught me that the open door was never really open at all.
Because sometimes we are making ourselves comfortable in the conference room while that security guard is lurking outside the door just waiting to throw us out.