'What went wrong?' This is how Exos CEO Sarah Robb O’Hagan owns her failure and navigates 'career despair'

When you lost your job, did you sulk? Or did you pick up the pieces and ask yourself what went wrong?

In her twenties, Exos CEO Sarah Robb O’Hagan found herself lingering in a “canyon of career despair.”

At the time, O’Hagan, a director of marketing at the Virgin Megastores, said she felt like an “unstoppable” force. Then, Virgin fired her out of the blue.??

?“I remember so clearly the absolutely mortifying experience of being walked to your office, filling your cardboard box of goodies, and then being walked out of the building, almost feeling like you’re a criminal,” O’Hagan said.

O’Hagan was frustrated and confused. Just a year prior, she’d been traveling through Cannes with Virgin founder, Richard Branson. Her first instinct was to blame the company for her firing.

“Everything I felt like I was never gonna get back on my feet again,” O’Hagan said.?

But after enlisting a career coach, O’Hagan opted to listen. She participated in a “360-degree feedback assessment,” with former Virgin co-workers, who provided brutally honest criticism regarding faults in her leadership.?

“I remember literally sweating at the thought of that,” O’Hagan said. “Because I knew I didn't really want to hear these horrible things, but I also was like, ‘Something clearly went wrong here that didn't in the other places and I gotta figure out what it was.’”

It was here that O’Hagan fist learned of her “rabble-rouser” reputation at Virgin.??

“The funny thing about feedback — we're always terrified to get it — but there was definitely constructive stuff,” she said. “It hurts when you first hear it…It came through loud and clear that I had been leading the conversations around the water cooler about what was going wrong and not doing anything about contributing to help fix the problem.”

O’Hagan realigned — and launched herself into a senior marketing role at Nike before moving onto executive positions at Gatorade, Equinox, Strava, and JetBlue.

“Out of the whole process, I think I distilled down very clearly for myself, ‘Okay, here’s what I want to make sure I do much better in my next role,’” O’Hagan said.?

By the time O’Hagan landed at Exos in 2020, the coronavirus pandemic was on the verge of triggering a global shutdown. As the sports performance company grappled with how to navigate the choppy waters to come, O’Hagan met the moment with open arms. Owning her failure and learning from her mistakes — lessons learned at Virgin — taught O’Hagan to keep cool and think clearly in the executive seat.?

“Nothing would have changed if I hadn’t taken ownership for my role in my own failure,” she said. “When something goes wrong, really sit down as a leader, as a teammate and be honest with yourselves about what your role was in what went wrong…Because if you don’t come up with the list of things you could have done better or differently, you have nothing to work on.”?

Are you honest with yourself when something goes wrong at work? How do you own your professional failure?

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