Name: Rejecting manager feedback catapulted her career
Uploaded: 2025-07-24T19:04:10.000Z
Duration: 5 min 33 s
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Past simple

The imperative

You don't really have footing in the job, let alone the professional world.

I risked potentially staying stagnant in my role or even getting fired.

I chose to reject my manager's feedback and that's how everything changed.

I was born and raised in the Silicon Valley.

My dad was a serial entrepreneur and then a CEO.

So really our dinner table conversations and everything we did was around the latest tech, venture capital, what was new, the new hot products.

My second job out of college, I was an analyst in strategy and tech.

Strategy sits in a really unique position where you can intellectually engage with the big questions that the business is facing.

I found this to be an exciting job, an opportunity to kind of speak up, ask some tough questions.

I think so much of what I brought to work was my personality.

So really working with people, bringing out their strengths and you know, I'm bubbly.

I take up some space in a room and I think that's part of who I really am.

Going into my first performance review, it was a bright sunny day and that really reflected how I was feeling.

I had had a great quarter and my work product was really solid.

So I went in pretty confident and really excited.

The conversation started with my manager kind of being like, this was good, this was good.

Pretty soon thereafter, he told me something along the lines of, hey, Meghana, you know, as a young woman in tech, you really don't need to be everyone's best friend.

I think you should be less bubbly and really put your head down and do the work.

I was really low for the first week or so.

I was sad, demoralized and also confused.

There were several days where I kind of had to do some hard thinking.

I think really what it came down to was he was happy with the work I was producing but didn't like how I was showing up.

I was the girl in every meeting speaking up, being contrarian.

He was just constrained to his own worldview, a world in which taking up space was breaking the rules.

A few weeks after my review was a pretty senior level meeting.

I was the most junior person in the room.

And in real time, I had to decide, do I show up how I want to show up or do I show up how I was told to show up?

I risked potentially staying stagnant in my role or even getting fired as I was choosing to reject direct feedback.

I showed up how I wanted to show up, asked a great question, asked a hard question.

And the president of the company was in the room and he expressed his support of the direction I was taking the conversation.

It ultimately resulted in the president asking me to present to a board of directors of a Fortune 500 company at, I want to say, not even 25.

It kind of felt like a validation of every decision I had made professionally.

Nothing would have changed if I had followed the rules.

From that moment on, it really catapulted, right?

I decided I wanted to be an executive leader in the space.

And I found out that that's something I'm good at.

I will say that increasingly brands are looking for a reduction in barriers.

I think when we really look at feedback, there's style versus substance.

If you have substantive feedback on the work product, take it, iterate, get better.

But if it's stylistic in a way that questions your authenticity, limits you being you, I think that's where you really need to think about whether that's feedback that you want to take to heart.

I think that's where you really need to think about