A Second Chance

Chapter 18

The company issued Ally a laptop and a tablet. The whole team had these tablets, and they would use them to collaborate. The laptop was easy enough to adjust to, but the tablet had this proprietary software on it that allowed for team sharing and easy connections to the smart whiteboards in the offices and conference rooms. It was really cool, but there was a learning curve there.

She fidgeted with the tablet as she tried to learn all the tasks it could complete. She was so engrossed with her new toy, she didn’t notice Evan walk into the room for their scheduled meeting.

“So what do you think so far?” Evan’s voice startled Ally out of her tunnel vision. He sat down in one of her guest chairs. “Do we have a chance?” He looked at her with so much hope in his eyes.

She gave him a small smile. “From what I can tell, you have an amazing team. They have a lot of fight left in them and some amazing ideas,” she started. “I just have one more piece of the puzzle I need. What happened to your team Evan, and what are your goals? I’m not talking about the goals put upon you by the board. What do you want to happen?”

He shifted awkwardly in his seat. “Things were going well. We were regularly securing contracts. The team was a force to be reckoned with, but then I broke us. I let my personal life tank all the work the team put in. First there was the accident. Lauri’s death created a media circus on its own, and then when it got out that it was Kyle that donated blood to save Kiana. Then things hit the fan. The scandals. My grief. My denial. All of it slowly killed my team’s momentum. By the time the custody case started, I had moved back into Mom’s house. I missed more work than I attended, and when I was here, I was mostly checked out. I didn’t protect my team. I didn’t support my team. They were left to float on their own until I finally stopped feeling sorry for myself and checked back in.”

“Okay so what do you see as your role with your team now,” she asked. Ally knew these were hard questions, but she needed the whole picture.

Evan sighed. “I want to guide them to victory. I want to show the board we haven’t lost our touch. I lost my focus there for a while, but we can make our team relevant again with the right support.”

Ally stopped taking notes and took a deep breath. “Evan, your team loves you, and they want to fight for you and with you to prove themselves to the board. They have some amazing ideas and huge hearts. I really do think you guys can pull this off; however, it is going to take the whole team and a ton of work. The timeline puts it in a tight place. You need to trust your team and be there for them…and I mean really be there with them in the trenches again.”

“I can do that,” Evan responded. Ally hoped it was true. His team loved him. All of them had hopes he would return to them and they could be rebuilt, but instead he just became more distant. He needed to get back to the “old” him. The Evan that loved what he did and created a sense of family.

“Good,” she replied. “Our next step is to meet with the team and formulate a cohesive game plan. Then we will take things from there. It looks like the whole team has availability tomorrow morning. I will get a meeting scheduled. We are at least a month behind, if not more, so we have a lot of ground to make up.”