She called a meeting of the full team—twelve people—and said: “I want to change something about how we work together. From now on, when you disagree with something in this room, I want you to say so in this room. I’m not interested in consensus for its own sake. I’m interested in being right. Those are different things. You will never be penalized for a disagreement you voice clearly and honestly. You will occasionally be asked to defend your position. That’s the deal.”
A woman named Priya, the senior research analyst, looked at Emily steadily from across the table and said, “Is that actually how it works, or is that what we say and then it turns out not to be how it works?”
Emily looked back at her. “Give me six months and judge it by what you see, not what I say right now. Fair?”
Priya considered. “Fair.”
It became how it worked.
By the third month, the division had sourced four new deals from outside the established relationship network—three of which moved to term sheet stage. The communication protocol between research and investment committee had been restructured so that analysis reached the committee forty-eight hours before any decision meeting, with a mandatory response cycle that required committee members to submit questions in advance. The deal flow problem was being addressed through a new partnership with three university entrepreneurship programs and two industry accelerators that had not previously been in the Reed Financial orbit.
It was real work. It was demanding and detailed and sometimes frustrating and occasionally exhilarating—the exhilaration that comes from a system beginning to function the way it was designed to, the particular satisfaction of watching something you built start to hold its own weight.
Emily worked long hours, but they were not the anxious hours of someone trying to prove something. They were the hours of someone absorbed in a problem they find genuinely interesting.
She had lunch with her father once a week, usually on Thursdays. They talked about the division sometimes, and about other things the rest of the time. He was careful not to offer unsolicited opinions about the work, because they had agreed on the structure of her authority and he was a man who honored agreements. She appreciated this more than she said.
Once, in the fourth month, he asked her how she was.
Not about the work. Just how she was.