She looked at him and she thought about the open door. She thought about the evenings she'd spent this week reading the report. She thought about Grace Whitfield and the email she'd sent to the investigation team at 11:47 p.m. and the fact that reaching out to Grace directly had been the first unambiguously right thing she'd done in the context of this entire situation. She thought about the version of herself she'd believed she was for 15 years and about the version the report had revealed and about whether there was a version a third one that was possible going forward. "I want to stay," she said.
"Why?" He asked. "Because leaving is easy," she said. "And I don't think I've earned easy." He held her gaze.
If you stay, he said, you're not staying as the person you've been. I know the culture change that needs to happen in this company is not a communication campaign. He said it's not a diversity initiative with a budget line and a quarterly report. It is a fundamental renegotiation of how this company sees people, who makes decisions, who gets heard, who gets access. It has to go into the structure of how we hire, how we evaluate, how we promote, how we communicate.
It has to become what we actually are, not what we say we are on the website. "I understand," she said. And you, he said, have to be the one who leads that. Not because you'll be the CEO doing a rebrand, but because the people in this building need to see the person who created the conditions of the problem also doing the work of solving it. That's the only version of this that means anything.
Victoria was quiet. That's going to require me to be publicly accountable, she said. Yes. To the employees, not just to the board. Yes.
She took a breath. Caleb, she said, "When you came back in after the SUVs after Richard, you could have handled this in any way you wanted. You had every justification for a much harder response than this." "I know," he said. "Why didn't you?"
He was quiet for a moment. "Because I built this company to be something," he said. And the way you respond to failure is part of what a company is. If I burned it down to prove a point about how it failed, I would have made the same mistake in reverse prioritizing the demonstration over the people. He paused.
The people in this building didn't fail. The leadership did. And leadership is correctable. She looked at him for a long time. Correctable, she said quietly.