The first room matters more than you think

My first job out of university was at Colgate-Palmolive.

I didn't understand at the time what a gift that was. I was twenty-something, ambitious, and mostly focused on proving myself. I had no framework for thinking about what kind of environment I was entering, whether the people around me would lift me or limit me, whether the culture would expand my sense of what was possible or quietly contract it.

I just showed up, and something started happening to me that I only understand now, looking back.

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The first thing I noticed was how they treated people who were leaving.

Shortly after I joined, there was a round of redundancies. They were closing a business unit. I watched how those people were managed out. There was care. There was genuine support for what came next. People were moved on with dignity not just words on a page, but in practice, in the way managers spoke to them, in the time taken, in the respect shown.

I remember thinking: if they treat people this way on the way out, I know how they'll treat me while I'm here.

That was my first lesson in what culture actually is. Not only the values on the wall, but the behaviour when it costs something.

My first manager was a man named Javier, he was young, driven, and enormously professional, the kind of person you could see was going somewhere, and who you wanted to follow because of how he operated, not just where he was headed. On my first day he sat me down, bought me a coffee, and told me:

"In this company, we really live our values. They're not on the wall, they're what we do."

He was telling the truth. I know because I tested it, I pushed back on things, I tried to change things, I made mistakes, and at every point, the organisation's response matched what Javier had told me on day one.

I was heard, I was developed, I was allowed to leave fingerprints on the work, small fingerprints, in an enormous machine, but mine, and real ones.

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What I didn't realise until much later was what that environment was doing to my identity, beyond just my skills, or my career, but my interior sense of what was possible for me.

Colgate was a global company, thoroughly international. The people around me were from everywhere, going everywhere. Conversations in the office were about next assignments in South Africa, in The US, global director roles in Europe, moves that to me felt audacious and to them felt completely natural.

Something happened to me in that room. I absorbed it. I started to think the way the people around me thought, no one told me to, but that is what environments do. They don't just teach you skills. They shape your sense of what you are allowed to want.

Your environment doesn't just shape what you know. It shapes what you think is possible for you.

It was in that office, surrounded by those people, that emigrating first became thinkable for me. Not a plan, just a thought that appeared one day as something ordinary rather than something terrifying. My colleagues were doing it. Naturally. So perhaps I could too.

And eventually I did. I trace that decision back to a room I sat in at twenty-something, surrounded by people who believed in themselves without apology.

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When I built MadeComfy, I built it with this formation inside me. I didn't call it that at the time. I just knew what I wanted the company to feel like. I wanted people to trust the culture the way I had trusted Colgate's. I wanted managers to have the conversation Javier had with me on my first day, and mean it. I wanted people to leave fingerprints.

Not every environment I've worked in since has been like that first one. Some have been its opposite, cultures where power is transactional, where trust is conditional, where the gap between stated values and lived behaviour is so wide it becomes its own kind of message.

I've learned from those too. Differently, but I've learned.

If you find yourself in a culture that doesn't match who you are, that feels like friction at the identity level, not just inconvenience, I'd say this: don't absorb it. Observe it. There is real learning in watching what you don't want to become, in seeing up close how fear-based leadership operates, in developing the muscle of navigating environments that weren't built for you.

Think of it as a present with ugly wrapping. Something is inside worth having, the pattern recognition, the self-protection, the clarity about what you will and won't become. You just have to be intentional enough not to mistake the wrapping for the contents.

A mismatched culture is not a dead end. It is a training ground, if you stay awake in it.

But this is what I most want to say to anyone choosing their first step, or their next one.

The environment you learn leadership in becomes part of your formation. The people you watch, the behaviours that get rewarded, the conversations that are allowed and the ones that aren't, these things don't just stay at work. They become architecture. They become the internal standard you carry into every room you walk into after.

Choose the first room carefully.

Not just the title, the salary, the brand name on the door. Ask: who are the people I'll be surrounded by? What do they believe is possible? What does this organisation do when it costs something; when a redundancy happens, when a mistake is made, when someone pushes back?

That culture will shape you before you know it's shaping you. The people in that room will expand or contract your sense of what you are allowed to become.

I was lucky. My first room was the right one.

I've spent the years since trying to build rooms like it, for my teams, for my children, and now for myself.

— Sabrina

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