My husband has just been let go from his fourth job in five years. The first time it happened was during Covid when he was laid off, but it seemed to start a pattern.
Twenty years ago, as the top digital and innovation executive for Citi's credit card business, I led the team that spent months building what looked like a brilliant partnership. We'd found a startup with a disruptive payments platform-one that became the forerunner of what has become a new payment type used by millions of consumers today. The deal: strategic investment in exchange for access to the startup's codebase as a sandbox for innovation pilots. No more waiting in the legacy systems queue. Just rapid prototyping with leading-edge developers.
There may be something unsettling happening on your team. Despite expected productivity gains from integrating AI tools, overall team performance appears to be declining. People are starting to second-guess themselves, and trust is eroding in ways that are hard to pinpoint. is a corporate scientist and first-ever chief science advocate at 3M who is the author of Jayshree Seth The Heart of Science book trilogy published by Society of Women Engineers (SWE).
No wonder it feels personal that this team rejects your efforts. It is personal; it's happening to you. But it's not about you. This team might have so much internal tension that they can't stand to be in a meeting together. Maybe they had a bad experience with your predecessor. They might think they know it all already and attending meetings is just wasting their time. Or it could really be as straightforward as what they've told you: Their working hours and training times are already used up.