When I look back, my story reads a bit like the Choose Your Own Adventure books from the ‘80s’90s. When I look back, there are many crossroads where one different (or perhaps safer) decision could have led me down a very different road. The first of those crossroads was saying yes to a receptionist job at one of the "best places to work" when I was 20 years old. The company was truly magical, human-centric and ahead of its time. We had autonomy, mastery, and purpose. We had creativity. We had FUN. That job forever formed my perception of the workplace; my standards were so high from the beginning. Professionally, I was a bit of a late bloomer, not finding my true passion until my late 20s. I remember being very apologetic about my resume because it read a bit like I was a job-hopper. I would spend a year or two in a job, then be enticed to try something different. I was definitely searching for something deeper. It was a pivotal moment when a female leader admonished me for apologizing and commended me for my kaleidoscope of experience. It was then I realized how each of those experiences wove together to provide me with something unique to offer. It wasn’t until I grew into my first CEO role that I was able to re-create that experience for my staff. I focused on decentralizing decision making, increasing transparency and empathy in the org, and challenging everything we all believed about what corporate life looked like. I demonstrated vulnerability before asking them to do so. I ensured that we were living and breathing our core values every day. It was incredibly rewarding, but as CEO, I was suddenly faced with a new set of challenges, giving me an incredible amount of empathy for other CEOs. The nuances (and blame-shifting) of the relationships between leaders and teams became evident to me. This relationship is the key to employee engagement, yet we largely ignore it in favor of pointing the finger in one direction or the other.