Lisa Portnoy came to Atlanta from Columbus, Georgia to attend Spelman College and went to work for Bickering Plummet when she earned her MBA in 1994. Highly qualified for upper management, she has consistently been passed over for consideration to the management training rotation and has remained a Tier 2 project coordinator for much of her tenure at the company. This oversight has nothing to do with her abilities, rather the situation she’s consistently found herself in.
Bickering’s internal promotions process requires the recommendation of a managing director for movement into the upper tier of management, and, for all her recent jobs, Lisa has had no management level supervisor. Throughout her early years with the company Lisa came to be regarded as a strong “utility” player and recognized as a reliable and consistent worker. Her last supervisor confided to a colleague that the main reason he didn’t recommend her for management is because he didn’t want to lose her as a team member.
Having proven herself capable of independent supervision, she has most recently found herself subbing for division directors who are absent or awaiting appointments at a fraction of the salary a director would earn. She has long since given over to frustration, caught between wondering why she doesn’t just move on to something better, and not wanting to make the last eleven years of her life a complete waste.
Early on, it was easy to justify sticking around. She had a lot of debt to pay off after school and Bickering Plummet seemed the perfect place for a young, ambitious Black woman to make a name for herself in her adopted hometown. Along the way, she met Calvin Summers, the man she would marry, and when she learned she was pregnant, just weeks after he’d been sent to Afghanistan, she figured it was best to stick with a sure thing. When Calvin died in combat, barely a month before their son, Jarod, was born, she now had another life to worry about, so staying just made more sense.
For the past year, Lisa had been overseeing Enterprise Software in the absence of its director, who’d been a ghost ever since taking over in 2004. Various rumors were circulating as to why he was a no-show: some say he’d been in poor health; others say he was detailed off to one of Bickering’s overseas concerns; other rumors claim he had taken a sabbatical to achieve enlightenment on a vision quest to Tibet. Whatever the cause, it once again fell to Lisa to keep things running until the director re-emerged.
The division she found upon taking over her duties was a disaster, losing clients and making little money for the corporation. Lisa assembled a capable and highly motivated team by filling key positions with reliable workers with whom she’s dealt in the past. Her satisfaction in watching the turnaround over the past year has been overshadowed by the fact that all her work increased the reputation of her invisible supervisor, Nelson Cabot, who many heralded as a genius for finally making Enterprise Software profitable.