[Image created with ChatGPT (OpenAI) using prompts by Heather Smith.]
Where Have All the Twin Flame Employers Gone?
Paula Cole once asked, “Where Have All the Cowboys Gone?” about longing for an ideal and discovering that reality is more complicated. Released in 1996, the song played with expectations, stereotypes, and the gap between what we imagine and what actually exists.
Lately, I’ve found myself asking a similar question about work: Does the “twin flame employer” really exist, or are we sometimes searching for an ideal we’ve romanticized?
What the Search Has Taught Me
A few years ago, I accepted a position that ultimately wasn’t the right fit. There wasn’t one dramatic moment that led me to that conclusion. Instead, the experience helped me recognize how important alignment is between a person’s strengths, the expectations of a role, and the environment in which they’re expected to do their best work.
It also changed the way I think about career fit.
Earlier in my career, I tended to focus heavily on whether I could do the job. Did I have the experience? Could I learn the technology? Could I solve the problems?
Those questions still matter. But leadership experience has taught me to ask different questions, too.
How does this organization make decisions? How does it use the expertise of the people it hires? How do teams collaborate? Is there room to question, improve, and experiment? And perhaps most importantly, are we trying to accomplish the same things?
A good match has to work in both directions.
Am I Glamourizing the Perfect Employer?
Some days I wonder whether I’m like Paula Cole, longing for a cowboy who never really existed.
Maybe the problem is the idea of a perfect employer.
No organization is perfect. Neither is any employee. There will always be competing priorities, difficult decisions, resource constraints, organizational change, and moments when people disagree.
That’s not misalignment. That’s work.
What matters is what happens next.
Can people disagree respectfully? Can expertise coexist with curiosity? Can someone say, “I think there’s a better way to do this,” without the conversation becoming territorial? Can leaders change their minds when someone brings forward a stronger idea?
That’s the kind of environment where I do my best work.
Expertise Isn’t Knowing Everything
One of the most valuable leadership lessons I learned came long before I worked in digital strategy.
When I was a fitness manager, I thought being responsible for a department meant I needed to know everything. I felt as though I should understand every specialty and perhaps even be capable of teaching every type of class myself.
My supervisor challenged that assumption.
He explained that my job wasn’t to know everything or be able to do everything. My job was to know how to find and hire talented people who could collectively get the job done.
I’ve carried that lesson with me ever since.
Good leaders don’t need to have all the answers. They need to create an environment where people can bring forward better ones.
That’s especially important in digital work, where no single person can be the deepest expert in UX, accessibility, analytics, content strategy, SEO, development, CRM, paid media, social media, emerging technology, and every platform an organization uses.
Leadership isn’t about being the smartest person in every room.
It’s about building the right room.
Looking Beyond the Checklist
That perspective has also shaped how I think about hiring.
Digital work has become extraordinarily specialized, yet job descriptions sometimes struggle to reflect that complexity. Organizations understandably look for candidates who already know their technology stack or who have followed a particular educational or career path.
Those qualifications can certainly matter.
But I’ve found that some of the most valuable skills are harder to capture in a checklist: understanding users, recognizing patterns, asking good questions, connecting systems, navigating ambiguity, learning new technologies, communicating across disciplines, and knowing when the problem you’re being asked to solve isn’t actually the problem.
Platforms change.
Good judgment transfers.
I’ve worked across enough technologies and organizations to know that expertise isn’t simply knowing where every button is. It’s understanding why you’re pushing it in the first place.
What Alignment Looks Like to Me
So what does my “twin flame employer” actually look like?
Not perfect.
Aligned.
It’s an organization that sees digital strategy, UX, accessibility, content, analytics, and technology as interconnected parts of an experience rather than isolated tasks.
It’s a place where people are hired for their expertise and then trusted to contribute it.
It’s a culture where collaboration doesn’t require everyone to agree, where people receive credit for their contributions, and where asking questions is part of making the work better.
It’s an organization that cares about outcomes without assuming burnout is the price of achieving them.
And it’s a place where mission matters.
Maybe the Goal Isn’t a Twin Flame After All
The more I think about it, the less convinced I am that I’m actually looking for a “twin flame employer.”
That implies finding some perfectly matched organization waiting out there for me.
Real professional relationships aren’t built that way.
Maybe what I’m looking for is something much more practical: an organization whose problems I can help solve, whose mission I believe in, and whose people see value in what I bring while I see value in what they bring, too.
That’s not perfection.
That’s partnership.
And after years of working across web, digital strategy, UX, accessibility, analytics, marketing, and organizational change, I’ve learned that partnership may be one of the most important technologies we have.