You're Gonna Miss Me When I'm Gone
Part 5 of the Witnessed Trust series — ← Part 4: Under the Rocks Are the Words · Part 6: Foregone Conclusions Gone Wrong →
Independent Consulting in a Nutshell
Rachel Botsman writes that what actually establishes credibility is "listening, observing and helping others feel seen, understood, and safe enough to think openly and decide with you."
I spent six years learning what that looks like in practice.
She worked out of a basement office.
The boiler was loud. The office flooded. She lost access to her workspace without warning. The fluorescent lights flickered and triggered her migraines. In the summer it was unbearable.
The message was constant, disruptive, and deliberately unaddressed. An environment engineered to interrupt her ability to function — every single day. Not just professionally. Physically.
She was Indigenous. So were most of her colleagues. The advisor they'd inherited and the president he lunched with were not.
This wasn't an oversight. It was a system.
The advisor showed up twice a year. He broadcast information he had no intention of discussing. He was available to the people who golfed and lunched and felt important. He was unreachable to everyone else. He had significant political connections. The normal rules didn't apply to him.
She had the technical authority to replace him. What she didn't have — yet — was the relational power to make it stick.
My job title said account management. What I was actually doing was something harder to name. She was the insider. She knew the people, the system, the constraints. She was the expert. I asked her questions about what she needed to achieve her goals and built the infrastructure around her answers. She built the alliances. She did the relational work. She created the conditions where she could use the power she already had.
I allowed her to guide the pace. Whenever it surfaced in conversation, I'd ask the question again. That's it. I just persisted in holding her vision.
So we didn't go for the quick win.
We spent six years doing the real work. She built the alliances. She strengthened her standing — not her title, her relationships. She created the conditions where she could use the power she already had. Slowly. Deliberately. In ways nobody saw and nobody celebrated.
When she finally fired him, she didn't just remove him from one file. She removed him from all of it. And the person she hired to replace him? Indigenous. Like her. Like the people he'd actually be accountable to.
That moment wasn't the victory. The six years were.
"Is that I don't belong to you — you're gonna miss me when I'm gone And you don't belong to me You're gonna miss me by my hair You're gonna miss me everywhere Oh you're gonna miss me when I'm gone"
— The Bellas, Freedom! '90 x Cups
This was my theme song when I left corporate. It took fourteen people to replace me.
This was why leaving was hard. My official KPIs measured transactions. They never measured what I actually saw — the impacts that unfolded slowly, over years, in ways that didn't show up on any report. Walking away meant leaving behind something nobody else could see — work that only existed because I was doing it, and impact that would simply vanish the moment I stopped. I was never paid to do it. It was the most valuable work I ever did.
Nobody sees this kind of work. It's not sexy. There's no pivot point you can put on a slide, no quick win you can package into a case study. It lives in the in-between — in conversations that build trust over time, in the patience required to work within a system designed to keep things exactly as they are, in the accumulation of relational capital that makes one decisive act possible.
People used to call me and say: "I don't know who can fix this — but I thought you might be able to figure it out."
That's the whole job description. Right there.
Because it was never about me. It was about what she needed to trust her own instincts and take action. About having someone who could witness that trust — and just keep asking the question until she was ready to use it.
That's the whole job.
Not rescue. Not quick wins. Not performing credibility on someone else's timeline.
Witnessing the vision someone else already holds for themselves, and persisting in holding it until they're ready to claim it as their own.
And if you scale this at the organizational level?
Unstoppable.