I Applied for a Demotion

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What I gave up to do the work I wanted

In February 2001, I applied for a job with a lower title than the one I already held. I was a product support manager at the time. The posting was for a communications coordinator.

My leadership supported the move because I explained the why behind the decision. Nobody talked me out of it.

Five months later, I won the manager title back, and I spent the next two and a half decades doing work I loved.

That’s the tidy version. It skips the nine months I spent waiting tables with a college degree.

The newsletter nobody was missing

I started at Airline Tariff Publishing Company (ATPCO) in June 1986 as a junior editorial assistant.

Somewhere in that first stretch I noticed something. Most companies I knew of had a companywide newsletter. ATPCO didn’t.

The critical information moved fine. Announcements went out. People knew what they needed to know week to week. That said, nobody was connecting the daily work to where the company was headed or telling the stories of the people doing it. That content never made the priority list, so it never saw the light of day.

Broken things make noise. Work nobody has started usually doesn’t. While nothing appeared to be broken, I saw an opportunity. I volunteered to start a newsletter. It ran on the side of my desk, on top of the job I’d been hired to do.

Within two years, leadership promoted me to publication manager, leading a team of nine.

I didn’t connect those two facts at the time. The newsletter felt like an occupational hobby, something that scratched two of my itches: content management and the technical aspects of producing it.

The pattern I couldn’t name yet

Around the same stretch, I started noticing a pattern.

The leaders I admired most, and the colleagues who seemed to rise quickly, all handled themselves in similar ways.

When they pitched an idea or shared an update, they never buried the lede. They also gave enough detail to be interesting. They were curious and asked questions before they spoke. When someone asked them a question, they said what they knew, what they didn’t, and shared what was still uncertain. And they wrote the way they spoke, which meant you could read their memo once and understand it.

I had no vocabulary for any of that yet, and I couldn’t have told you it was a discipline rather than a personality trait.

All I knew was that I admired their ability to communicate effectively and wanted to be able to do the same.

A Thanksgiving remark that moved my family

I met Allison, my wife, at ATPCO. She’s my soulmate, and everything from here forward is a decision the two of us made together. We consult on all things, large and small. Early on, she’d joke that I was the only man she knew who had an opinion about kitchen towels.

While still at ATPCO, we married. Our first daughter arrived about a year later.

Before we were married, I met and got to know her family. We spent Thanksgivings in Atlanta, all of us under one roof for the week. It was a tradition. During one visit, my brother-in-law said something in passing. We always have such a good time when we’re altogether. Wouldn’t it be great if we all lived in Atlanta?

That remark planted a seed. Not just with me, but with everyone within earshot.

Allison and I decided we wanted to raise our family near family, on one income. After our first born arrived, Allison never returned to ATPCO. I left in February 1994 and moved to Atlanta

My brother-in-law and sister-in-law opened their home to us while I looked for work. Another brother-in-law, who moved down with his family earlier, finished the basement so that we’d have a place to stay. I’ll always remember their generosity. You don’t repay it. You pass it on.

Three families: six adults and six kids, all living under one roof. I wouldn’t attempt that with any one else, including my own side of the family.

Nine months of finding the floor

Here’s the part I usually skip.

Through most of 1994, I sold computers at Computer City, the superstore chain Tandy Corporation ran at the time. I started on the retail floor and moved into business sales after about three months. Before that, I turned to what helped me earn my way through college, waiting tables.

That’s what supporting a family looked like then.

Nine months passed between my last corporate role and my next one. Not a long stretch by any measure but long enough. And candidly, the timing was perfect because shortly after I landed the job with SITA, the world’s leading specialist in air transport communications and information technology, our twin daughters were born. The new job opened doors, literally, because the higher salary enabled us to buy our first home.

I’m convinced that moving out of our in-laws’ home just before our twins were born is the reason my brother-in-law still speaks to me. 😉

I could turn those months into a romance of struggle. Some romance showed up; we were young and still in the honeymoon stage. Without a higher-paying job, however, plenty of struggle came with it. Mostly, though, the months meant work. I picked up shifts. I moved up when I could, and I kept going.

Those months taught me grit; they also gave me information.

While I faced hardship earlier in my life, I did it on my own. Now, I had a family depending on me. That’s a different kind of pressure. I learned where that floor was. It held.

Back up, then down again intentionally

In November 1994, I landed at SITA as a product support executive. In August 1998, leadership promoted me to product support manager, leading a nineteen-person team.

Manager again. Third time I’d earned that title, counting the night club I ran for a stretch after college.

Then in early 2001, as the SITA and Equant joint venture reorganized, an internal posting appeared for a communications coordinator. Coordinator, an individual contributor with no direct reports. A title below the one on my badge. Allison and I consulted. I applied and earned the role.

My compensation held, though I suspected I’d landed at the top of the range for the position. A ceiling on day one, and I took it anyway.

The big pill and the relief

That was a big pill to swallow. I’d earned the manager title three times by then, at the night club, at ATPCO, and at SITA. I’d led people for years and made a positive impact.

Two things were true at once. The first one is obvious. Handing back a leadership role and a team stung.

The second I didn’t admit out loud for a long time. Part of me was relieved. I loved coaching people, but I didn’t love conducting annual performance reviews for a large team. That whole cycle vaporized, and I felt lighter.

I must’ve missed the day in class when they talked about the entire corporate function devoted to employee and business communications. Once I saw it, I wanted in. This move was the price of admission.

Off the side of the desk

What happened next told me I’d chosen right.

I took what I’d learned as the managing editor of a newsletter at ATPCO and built a monthly publication for North America. I also designed and launched a regional intranet site. When the merger with Global One reached Day 1, I got the internal communications out on time, because the work belonged to me now.

Same role I’d volunteered for more than a decade earlier. Same type of work, but different, because it no longer lived on the side of my desk.

In July 2001, the joint venture split. I transitioned to Equant and leadership named me communications manager, five months after taking the lower title.

I was on my way.

What I couldn’t know in February

The neat version of this story shades the truth. I couldn’t know in February that what happened in July was coming. When we made the decision, no crystal ball told me how long I’d hold that role. Had it lasted three years instead of five months, the lesson would still hold, but the telling would be a lot harder.

And I could make that trade partly because of 1994. Allison and I had already chosen one income and to move to an area that was both closer to family and more affordable. I’d already found the floor and knew it held. Someone who’s never tested their limits carries a different kind of risk. Uncertainty and low confidence together frighten anyone. It’s human.

I won’t tell you to take the lower title. I will tell you to consider what it’ll cost you and decide whether you can carry that cost.

Parting Thoughts

Here’s the lesson I would’ve loved to have learned earlier. Your career, like life, isn’t linear.

The work you volunteer for is your compass talking. Not the job you were hired to do. The thing you keep picking up unasked, on top of everything else, with nobody paying you for it.

I volunteered to start that newsletter in my first couple of years at ATPCO. It took me until 2001 to follow the signal and discover my purpose, and I gave up a title to do it.

More than a decade to act on my own evidence.

Calibrating your compass, the first discipline in Lead with Light™, starts with noticing exactly this. Your keystone virtues are already sending you data. Most of us never build the vocabulary to read it.