PART 3B: WATER BREAK

Reckoning…the retribution for one’s actions, an appraisal or judgement, the settlements of rewards or penalties. If you’ve been through the wringer, you understand the pain of confrontational and hard truths. The ones you can’t run from. The ones that were more or less evident. The ones that you mistook for fact. The ones that stand out. The ones that force you to question where you are, how you got here, and what it’s all for. Reckoning can feel sudden, dramatic and rip-roaring. It can also feel plodding, long-winded, and slow-burning. Irrelevant of how it presents, it’s rarely isolated or random. There are always inklings of its eventuality…some more pronounced than others.

No one was prepared for the double aftershock that hit Lynk in November 2020. It was a seemingly normal day. I’d woken up tired (common) and slightly wired (also and sadly common), but ready to take on the day. It was one of the days that dragged on and on. Fires to put out. Delayed projects. Angry customers. Mishaps with vendors. Worker disputes. By the time I got into my cab and was headed home, I was beaten. I usually set my phone to Do Not Disturb after work hours. Fatigue or fate had it that on this occasion, it remained available and on loud. My mind drifted from nowhere to everywhere as I watched cars, buses, motorcycles, bikes and pedestrians buzz by. I’m woken up from my daze by a loud and startling ring. I glance down at my phone. The number’s familiar, but the call is very unexpected. We never communicate on voice calls. This is odd. I have a diminished capacity to talk, let alone put out more fires…but it’s probably important. I pick up begrudgingly. It’s the CFO and co-founder. He asks if I am home. No, I am on my way. He asks if I am alone. Yes, I am in a cab…what’s up? He asks if now is a good time to talk. I lie and say that now’s a better time than any. My chest tightens and I try to inhale deeply. He’s finally relocating with his family. We expected this, we knew Kenya was not the end game. Not a big deal. Remote work’s been a reality for 60% of the team since COVID-19, we’ll adjust. I slowly start to exhale. He pauses awkwardly and tries to find the appropriate vocabulary to continue. There’s more. A lot more. I inhale deeply this time and retain my breath at its top. He’s also made the very difficult decision to step away from his acting capacity as an executive and co-founder. The company’s just about to enter a fundraising period. I’m now the one who struggles to find wording. I exhale sharply and with more audible resistance. I ask when he is leaving. End of the month. We’re almost halfway in. We don’t have time. He creates space for me to ask questions. I’m dumbfounded and tell him so. I need time to process. Our conversation ends. Sucker-punch number one. Delivery is hard and steady to the gut.

I toss and turn most of the night. My sleep is disorderly, drunken, and filled with a slew of erratic dreams. In between the heaviness of each stupor, I wake up each time, more confused. My heart continues to beat off rhythm. I can’t shake off the feeling of imminent destruction. I run through scenarios of a worse fate. I attempt to push out my thoughts and fail each time. I toss and turn again until vertigo forces me still. I lay starfish under the weight of my covers and stare at the wooden ceiling for what feels like hours. I finally roll over and glance at my twin-bell clock. It’s one hour to my alarm. I’ve barely slept but now I can’t go back to sleep. I contemplate. I need a distraction or several. Routine will help. I get up, put on my running gear, and head out for a longer run than usual on a weekday. By the time I get back home, my body and mind feel a little lighter. I stretch, attempt to meditate, pray, then shower. I make a to-go breakfast and leave additional plates for my sisters who are still asleep. I grab my bag, walk down the flights of stairs, and wait for my Uber. He’s late and keeps on making wrong turns despite clear instructions. I make one last attempt to direct him, only this time he’s hollering about women’s inability to navigate. I don’t have the energy for a verbal exchange. I appease him by agreeing with his deduction and tell him that I’ll cancel the ride. I proceed to do so as I angrily make my way towards the main road. I request another cab. The previous Uber is blowing up my phone. I blocked him and reported the incident. The new cab is also struggling to find me. I ask him to use the map and he eventually finds me. I enter his vehicle apprehensive but relieved to be on my way.

On the ride to work, I attempt to meditate again. After some deep breathing exercises, I’m able to slow down and focus on reconnecting to my root chakra. Just as I’m getting into a sedative flow, we’ve reached. I wish I could tell Uber to loop around, but I need to face reality. I must hold it together until the news breaks to the rest of the team. I get out and walk to our warehouse. It’s 9 am. Everyone else is already in the facility. I make my morning rounds before proceeding to set my bags down in the adjacent office. I’ve barely settled in when my colleague asks to speak privately. Even though their body language reads atypical, I remain calm...at least outwardly. We walk a few meters outside the warehouse and into the larger vicinity. It’s a hot day. The reflection from the cabro road and surrounding brick and metal infrastructures aren’t kind. We make our way to a semi-shaded area where a patch of grass has miraculously maintained its green amidst the scorched earth. My colleague is now in full view. Worry and despair show so evidently now. I inhale intensely as my body automatically goes rigid. The story begins to unfold. They’d just attended a meeting with our Finance Team and the position of the company is far worse than had been communicated. We wouldn’t be able to make payroll let alone maintain operational expenses for the month. It didn’t make sense. We’d been performing better and better each month. All reporting up to this point suggested that there was more…there should have been more. Panic. Confirmation of cash position. Panic. Reconfirmation of cash position. Panic. Re-reconfirmation of cash position. Each inquisition led to another and another. There was no sense of mulling things by ourselves. We needed clarity. Without hesitation, we called for an emergency meeting with our co-founders. They clear their schedules and join the call within minutes. We share the details of our findings and our fears openly. Uncertainty. Tension. Confusion. They share that while we’ve been building a runway, major sources of funding we’d anticipated in the month prior haven’t materialized. They also share that they’re already in promising conversations with our board and are anticipating additional support by the end of the month. We’re doubtful, especially with one of our founders leaving soon. We can’t wait. We must intervene now. They reassure us further that the business has the resilience to make it through this period, citing that we’ve been in similar financial positions in the past. We still have an unshakeable sense that this time is drastically incomparable for reasons outside anyone’s control e.g. COVID, fundraising climate etc. Panic. No clear confirmation of the way forward. Panic. Reconfirmation of timelines for board intervention. Panic. Re-reconfirmation of co-founder end-date. Panic. Sucker-punch number two. Delivery is harder and steadier to the same location, straight to the gut.

We knew better and from past experiences, to avoid siloed decision-making. To understand how to move forward, we needed inputs from Team Leads (TLs) and Senior Management reps (SMT). My colleague and I assumed full responsibility for creating a task force comprised of just this and scheduled our first meeting with immediate effect. Led by the remaining co-founder and CEO, the objective of the task force was to discuss and comprehensively map all pathways for the business from continuity to hibernation, acquisition, and closure. In all instances, we exhaustively detailed the activities, responsibilities, timelines and communication frameworks needed to realise the desired outcome. It’s very unsettling to be in the eye of the hurricane as chaos ensues around you. Much like in meditation, finding clarity and focus comes not by ignoring or shutting out the noise around you, but by accepting the full reality surrounding you and working through it anyway - with bravery and courage. Although the tone and position of the task force were mixed, we agreed that pursuing multiple pathways was ideal. So while our CEO continued to pursue support for business continuity (i.e. bridge financing), we focused on hibernating the business and buying more time. Our survival tactic was clear. Get whatever the hell needed to be done in the fastest way possible. We developed a methodical plan for each team to execute and followed it pretty much to the letter T:

1. HR & People Ops: Debrief staff and workers, ensure due diligence for contractual processes for redundancy are adhered to, provide additional emotional support for the transition

2. Tech & Product: Deactivate and delist all customer-facing products e.g. website, app

3. Marketing: Create and manage all external communication (newsletters, social media, phone calls, emails etc) with customers and partners

4. Operations: Accelerate work in progress and cease all activities outside of construction and fit-outs

5. Finance: Accelerate all reconciliation processes, develop and share updated logs of outstanding payments, and liaise with departments to gain an understanding of job status before chasing up clients and collecting money in arrears

Our hibernation plan was an all-hands-on-deck situation. No job was out of bounds or out of scope. Whatever the task, everyone on the task force rolled up their sleeves and chipped in. And even in the zombie-like states of fatigue and frustration, we found ourselves in many times, egos and strong opinions took the back burner. We had a collective desire to give it our all, even if it ended. We met multiple times a week to share progress, mitigate fallout, and pivot where needed. We also understood that as we continued to make progress and reach the end of our hibernation plan, we’d all become obsolete. The grace and maturity that TLs and the SMT demonstrated from the onset were of great significance and an even greater testament to who we were, what we built, and how we wanted to be remembered. Coming together in the way we did was so powerful! But it wasn’t all cherries, lemonade and unicorns. The hibernation process brought up a lot of feelings of resentment and bad faith for many, myself included. Why hadn’t the severity of where we at hit home sooner? Why weren’t we informed earlier? Why had the full truth been concealed? I felt blindsided and deceived. I expected more. I wanted transparency. I wanted accountability. I want acknowledgement and responsibility for leading us here in the first place. None of the things I want come to fruition…at least not immediately, or in the form I deemed appropriate at the time.

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We sometimes use the terms leadership and management interchangeably…but they’re not synonymous. An article by Natalia Rossingol on the Future of Work (2023) dives into the fundamental differences in more detail. To contrast the two, Rossignol pulls the definition of leadership from one previously articulated by Kevin Cruse (founder and CEO of LEADx), as “a process of social influence, which maximizes the efforts of others, towards the achievement of a goal” and pins it up against her definition of management “the process of coordinating efforts…to accomplish objectives, using available resources”. Based on these distinctions, we learn that where the leader’s focus is on the bigger picture (creating vision, empowering others, creating the ideal conditions to deliver) the manager’s focus is on efficiency and effectiveness (planning, budgets, control, organizing, staffing etc). Taking her considerations as fact, we can then conclude that not all managers are leaders, and vice versa…leadership doesn’t have to be tied to a certain position or title. To understand this even better, let’s look into other distinguishing characteristics. In 1977, Abraham Zaleznik published a pioneering article titled “Manager and Leaders: Are They Different?” that critically assessed how differences in behaviour and approaches between managers and leaders result in diverging outcomes. Zaleznik defined management as “embracing processes, seeking of stability, and maintaining control… to resolve problems quickly” whereas leadership was defined as “tolerating chaos, a lack of structure, and the willingness to delay closure … to gain fuller context and understanding of the issue”. Ultimately Zaleznik believed that one’s ability to react to business situations was predicated on their outlook. In this way, we can understand leadership and management respectively as creating the tone vs. setting the tone, disrupting and leading change versus maintaining the status quo, thinking short-term vs. long-term, embracing change vs. managing and mitigating risk etc. At the end of the day, it’s about perspective. A leader goes above and beyond to not only take responsibility but understand how it happened and what we can do about it.

Entitlement is often rooted in the belief that you’re deserving of something. Sometimes it’s because you think you’ve earned your stripes and are veteraned. Other times it’s because you’ve made sacrifices that need to be acknowledged or rewarded. Or perhaps it’s because you don’t agree with what’s happening and think you can do a better job. Whatever the case, it’s very harmful to make assumptions and expect special treatment without the real context of what’s happening. It’s so much easier to dish out feedback or have an opinion when you aren’t the one leading. Lynk’s crisis period was a wake-up call. It helped me check myself. Check my biases, check my entitlement, and check my assumptions. I could either spend my time criticizing top-down decision-making or the absence of it, or I could look inward at my complacency. I could either whine about the unfairness of being pigeon-hold or find ways to navigate what was within our control. It required constant and intentional reframing. I had to remind myself of those hard and confrontational truths. I wasn’t a founder. I wasn’t an executive. I wasn’t a stakeholder…at least not in the sense of equity. There were decisions that I would never understand. Our founders didn’t owe me an explanation for everything. I also had to remind myself that whatever the case, I cared. I had to shift my entitlement into expectation. What would my team expect from me? What would workers expect from me? What would I expect from myself as an agent of change and reason? It was a daily pep talk and conversation. Sure I wanted closure, but I also wanted to be objective about what was happening now. What could I do to steer decision-making in the fallout? For any organization to be successful or at least operate well, both managers and leaders need to be present and work in harmony towards similar outcomes. Lynk was bigger than any of us…I needed to stop acting and thinking like a manager. Big girl leadership shoes, hats, and jackets needed to be embraced. Sucker-punch number three. Delivery is harder and steadier still to the same location, straight to the gut, but partially blocked. Contact minimal.

Change is inevitable. We’ve heard it a million times over. We anticipate it, we prepare for it…but it doesn’t make the transitions any easier. When we started the process of hibernation in mid-November, we didn’t think we’d be able to fairly compensate our staff and workers. No employer should receive additional acknowledgement or praise for holding their end of the bargain. We didn’t just have a legal and contractual obligation to staff and workers, but a moral one. Claiming what’s rightfully yours and what’s been written by law should be a straightforward process — especially in Kenya where the labour laws are pro-employee and amongst the most progressive in Africa. But after dealing with poorly managed transitions where gaslighting and manipulation tactics were used to wiggle out of what’s expected, I know that following through isn’t a given. Finding your voice and power in such cases is tricky and icky. Sometimes I’ve dared to fight, and other times I’ve walked away for the sake of my sanity. Whatever you choose, remember that compensation for your services is your pay, not kindness, sympathy or renouncement. Despite the very real financial downturn Lynk was in at the time, and considering the uncertainty of business continuity as a whole, our founding and leadership team made no excuses. All stones, rocks, and pebbles were turned to ensure contractual terms were respected. It is because of the rapid turn-around and collective efforts of the task force that between November 2020 and Feb 2021, we not only paid off all staff (salaries and severance packages) but also paid off all informal workers in the production facility (stipends and bonuses) and beyond (distributed workers).

The last employees actively engaged during and after the hibernation period were me, and the colleague who broke the news to me in early November. Like me, they felt a deep sense of duty and responsibility not only to Lynk’s mission and vision but also to our people. We both believed that Lynk’s success was not confined to the entity and that transformation could continue. We wanted to be intentional about paving the way as well as maintaining good professional relationships with staff and workers should we cross paths post-hibernation. As such and with the support of former TLs, SMT and the founders, we worked further to make personal introductions to partners and our networks, write and circulate letters of recommendation, provide support for interview prep, and even equitably distribute Lynk assets amongst workers and aspiring entrepreneurs. Looking back, I know we didn’t have the resources or capacity (physical and emotional) to do more. Nonetheless, being able to pour in even more during such dark times, felt good. A way to set things right.

A crisis within a crisis. Businesses shut down, health systems destabilized, deaths recorded in the millions, and unemployment, poverty, and domestic violence at an all-time high. Everyone was affected by the global pandemic in one way or the other. For some, it was a period of awakening — becoming intensely aware of what’s important and what fuels you. For others, it was a period of survival — fighting to simply stay afloat. Whatever the case, everything was happening at the same time…no pause, no cadence. A powerful quote I’ve heard is “What you give or pay attention to becomes your reality”. Simply put, if you only focus on what’s going wrong and have no opportunities to pop out (of our either thoughts or the thing itself) finding the light to power through is often impossible. One year into COVID, I was still reporting to work 97% of the time. The reality of my days wasn’t only different in terms of how I navigated issues of health and safety, but even more in how I built emotional toughness and resilience. I often didn’t have the headspace to do what I wanted and even less energy outside of work. When I did have capacity, I tried to listen to my body and create more real estate in the process. From introspective journaling to sleeping in when my body allowed, to not beating myself up for not having the energy to engage in activities that would have otherwise fueled me. I didn’t know how burned out I was my small isolation community of 7 started to create more capacity for me to decompress and recenter. My sisters were especially instrumental in nurturing a safe and connected sense of grounding and home…baking together (cinnamon rolls were a fave), gyming together, staycations, and accessing more spaces of greenery and nature…they understood, anticipated and addressed my needs when I couldn’t do so for myself. At the time it felt small, but it was so largely impactful to not feel so overwhelmed all the time. And with other lifelines to former Lynk colleagues as well as mentors and sponsors who made time to check in, hop on calls, and problem-solve, the weight of having to make difficult decisions felt a little lighter…shared of sorts. I was very lucky to have had external perspective and support in a time of real pandemonium.

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There are many players involved in delivering an ideal food experience. The plate of food that lands on your table is a culmination of many people’s efforts. From the waiting staff to the line cooks, the runners, the top chefs, the food and beverage managers, to the marketing and communications team. Nothing is ever delivered in a vacuum. There is planning, coordination and execution involved. The nature of my work necessitates identifying what went wrong (gaps), determining what could have gone better (opportunities), and ultimately having an understanding of what went well/should be repeated or reinforced (institutional OS). It requires me to have a deeper understanding of all the players, their roles, their tasks, their needs and the overall objective. As I retrospectively process this very tumultuous period in my career, I see with more clarity how so many things are interconnected. I understand that even when I feel like I have no control, my obligation as a manager shouldn’t be separated from my obligations as a leader. I also understand that I am not removed from the problem. It’s not us vs. them. Me vs. top management or leadership. I am leadership. I am management. I too am accountable. Even more importantly, if or when the sink ships, steering and redirecting limit the wreckage and fatalities.

Reckoning isn’t an endpoint…it’s a process and a revelation. While I haven’t fully made it to the other side, the process of documenting and reassessing is a movement towards clarity. Lynk’s hibernation period felt very much like a Slow Foxtrot…arbitrary rhythms, weighted rising and falling, opposing vertical and horizontal movements. There were so many moving pieces and extended periods of not knowing what was next, all while time stood still. I had very little control over most things. Yet, it was also the period with which I stepped up most significantly. I demanded more control and gained more autonomy to make decisions that had real consequences. Without the tremendous discomfort that caused me to level up and act, I would have not found the courage or maturing to lead authentically.

Decisions I made individually or collectively during and after Lynk’s hibernation have been perceived in so many lights. From those who believed moral purity was a tactic to distance me from responsibility to those who swear I knew and actively held information about Lynk’s impending doom, to others who have made up elaborate stories about me being in cahoots with the cofounder for a big payout. I have heard and continue to hear insane theories from those inside and outside of the crossfires. I’m not impenetrable to backlash, nor am I numb to feeling betrayed. Hard decisions are hard for that very reason. As a leader, you’ll need to make many hard decisions that people don’t understand or support. Following through doesn’t require bullishness or arrogance. It necessitates the opposite. A deep level of care and interest to gain perspective, understand needs, and champion the best outcomes regardless.