Back to business, not because the other conversation hadn't mattered, but because this was also who she was. This woman who could hold two things at once and give each its proper weight. The safety and infrastructure division. She said, "Here's what I'm envisioning. " She walked him through it for 40 minutes. Not a presentation, a conversation, back and forth with her asking his opinion on specific structural decisions and listening when he answered and changing things based on what he said.
By minute 20, he had stopped thinking of it as her plan that she was presenting to him and started thinking of it as something they were building in real time in a room on the 38th floor. The division would oversee physical safety, building systems, emergency protocols, and and this was the piece that surprised him, a new internal audit function for infrastructure contractors. A position that looked at the ground level of how the company actually functioned, not the spreadsheet version. You said something in the parking structure on floor two. Victoria said when Okafor was talking about complicated plans about too many pieces.
He said you said the more pieces the more that can go wrong. She tapped the folder. That's the philosophy I want running through this division. Simplicity, redundancy, honest assessment of failure points before they fail. She paused.
That's not how companies think. Companies think about optimization and efficiency. They don't think about what breaks and who notices when it breaks and whether anyone will listen to the person who noticed. Gerald noticed. Darius said the error codes on the emergency panel.
He told me right away. She looked at him. I know. She said Gerald has been in that lobby for 9 years. I knew his name.
I didn't know he'd never seen those error codes before or what that meant. A pause. That's the gap I'm trying to close. The conversation went another 20 minutes. At the end of it, Victoria set the folder down and looked at him directly.
Salary, she said. She named a number he kept his face even. It was more than three times what he made with the building services contract. Not obscene for a senior leadership position at a company this size. It was actually on the modest end, which told him she'd thought about it carefully.
Had tried not to make it a number that would make him feel like charity benefits full coverage, she said, including dependent coverage. The position is classified as senior director level, which comes with certain stock provisions that I'll have Patricia walk you through separately. She paused. The title is senior director of safety and infrastructure. You report directly to me.
He was quiet for a moment. I want to earn the position, he said. Not be handed it. I know you do. " She leaned forward slightly. "So, here's what I'm proposing.