Stepping out on her own

Some little girls dream of being president or an astronaut or an Olympic gold medalist. Gabrieline Reece’s dreams were just as specific, though seemingly a little more achievable. 

“Growing up, I always wanted to work in corporate,” Reece said, “because as a woman of color I felt like a corporate title and executive position was everything I ever wanted.” 

To achieve her goals, Reece, who was born in Liberia but came to Minnesota when she was just 3-years-old, went to college and earned degrees in business management and health care management. When she landed her first corporate job right out of college, she figured her future was bright. But it didn’t take long for Reece to realize that, for her at least, the corporate environment wasn’t what she’d always dreamed it would be. 

“I worked in human resources and different executive level positions,” Reece said. “When I was working in those roles I experienced a lot of mental agony and stress because of poor leadership and feeling like I didn’t belong because of the work culture.” 

Reece admits it can be hard to put a finger on what made her feel so out-of-step in the corporate world, but she said that the microaggressions and mismanagement she experienced almost daily took a toll on her mental well-being. She felt like her mostly white colleagues didn’t always understand where she was coming from, and when she raised an issue or pushed back on what felt like unfair work expectations, her concerns were often written off or dismissed. 

“If I were to react in a defensive manner or stand up for myself, I would be labeled as the ‘Angry Black woman working in corporate,’” Reece said. “I was labeled as not engaged, as closed off or not being part of a team. I had to walk on eggshells. I felt I had a target on my  back.” 

Though she had a good salary to go along with her impressive title, Reece found corporate work to be a drain on her psyche. Conflicts with colleagues — direct or indirect — sent her in a spiral of anxiety and turned the career she felt like she’d always wanted into a nightmare. 

“It created self-doubts,” Reece said of her work. “I lost about 10 to 20 pounds. When I came home to my apartment at night, I would be stressed out. I was overthinking my reactions. My anxiety was off the roof.” During evenings and weekends, when she should’ve been relaxing, Reece said, “I was pacing around my home, talking on the phone with close friends and family, trying to figure out, ‘Why am I being targeted? What can I do to better myself?’ I didn’t realize that it wasn’t me, that I wasn’t the problem.”

After two years in the trenches, Reece decided to abandon her corporate career and set out on her own. 

“After a while I was like, ‘You know what? I’m good. I’m going to start my own thing. I’m just done,’” she said. “I only worked in corporate for a couple of years. Not long — but long enough to know that it wasn’t working for me.” 

A clash of cultures

At the beginning of her corporate career, Reece thought she’d found the perfect work environment. “I worked for an all-female leadership team,” she said. “There was an African American woman, an interracial woman and other white-bodied individuals.” She felt like this combination of leaders would make the work environment more humane and understanding: “Coming in, I felt like, ‘OK. Great. I have another Black woman and an interracial woman. They understand the struggle that Black women go through in corporate. This should work.’”

But it didn’t work out like Reece had hoped. Her natural acuity meant that she quickly mastered technical issues that had been a struggle for some of her colleagues. Instead of seeing her skills as a gift, Reece said her workmates saw them as a challenge. 

“I caught on pretty fast, which became a threat to a lot of people,” Reece said. “I’d get good reviews, then all of the sudden weird jealousies would pop up. I wasn’t getting promotions. Instead, I was getting ‘silent promotions,’ where I had more things added to my plate but I wasn’t getting more pay added to my plate.”

Reece wasn’t sure how to handle these issues. She wanted to be seen as a team player, but she also wanted to have the respect and support of her colleagues. She felt like the corporate world she’d always dreamed of joining wasn’t letting her in. She felt like she’d have to change her way of thinking and behaving if she wanted to make it work. 

“Going through my education, I was only prepared for what I will face when it came to doing the work,” Reece said. “I was prepared for how I should be as a leader and how I see myself in someone who is being a leader. I wasn’t prepared for the other little things that just chipped away at my confidence and sense of self.” 

Even in workplaces where she wasn’t the only Black woman in the room, Reece said that she often had the overarching feeling that the reason she wasn’t quite fitting in was because the culture was based on white standards of being and communicating. 

Corporate America is, she said, a “family reunion for white people. When I come to work I just want to do my job. Let’s not waste about 30 minutes of our time talking about your daughter going through a divorce. I love you and adore you but that’s not what it’s about.” She explained that Black women have a different attitude about work. “When we work, we work to get the job completed. We want to do a good job,” she said. “We don’t want to sit there and chit-chat about things we don’t know anything about.” 

It felt hard to explain her concerns to people for whom corporate culture felt natural and comfortable. When she tried to ask for change, her requests were often met with confusion and even frustration. “I feel like in corporate, they don’t want to change the problem,” Reece said. “They want to ignore it. They want to hide it under the rug.” 

In the end, Reece said she turned her back on her dreams when she realized that work stress was taking over her life. She might have been able to make her corporate career work if she was willing to change her personality to match the existing office culture, but she said she likes who she is and wasn’t going to change herself to meet someone else’s expectations. 

“Being a Black woman, when we come into a corporate work environment, there are already expectations set for us that we don’t know about,” she said. She was tired of feeling misunderstood and angry. “I thought,” Reece recalled, “’You hired me because of my confidence and honesty. Why are you putting this chip on my shoulder?’”

Creating a new environment

When she stepped away from her corporate career, Reece found herself out on her own. She’d saved some money, so she decided to make a job for herself, hoping that one day she’d be able to employ other people just like her, mostly Black and brown women who wanted to do big things in business in their own style.

“I had to fund myself,” she said. “I had to work to get money to fund things by myself. I had a passion. So to come into that work field, learning what I’d learned wasn’t really what I was headed for.” 

In 2016, Reece created Brand Experience, her own creative agency, where she and a small team help clients create marketing and branding strategies. She also created Women Who Influence, a nonprofit focused on holding up Black women who work in corporate environments through virtual group support meetings; monthly “Networking in Color” events; and special events, like the Pink Apple Brunch, a yearly awards ceremony honoring the often-unrecognized work of women.  

“The goal of the nonprofit is to bring awareness to the mental health space for Black women in corporate America, to be a safe haven where they are able to communicate with each other,” Reece said. 

Reece’s interests don’t end at changing corporate America. She’s also a budding filmmaker, whose first documentary, “Shot of Influence,” featured 11 influential Minnesota women, including herself, talking about their work and the challenges they’ve faced through the course of their careers. She created and promoted the documentary with the support of the Minnesota Women’s Press and Twin Cities Film Fest.

Mikki Morrissette, Minnesota Women’s Press publisher and editor, said that Reece’s determination and drive were what got the movie off the ground and into the hearts of viewers. 

“She was a phenom in the way she tackled that project,” Morrissette said. “I was impressed with how she simply did it, without the general expertise in documentary step-taking that others might normally do.” 

Reece lacked experience in moviemaking, Morrissette said, but she made up for that in moxie, even finding a way to premiere the movie at a local theater. “She assembled a good team with her for filming, editing, celebrating, and showcasing the event in a local ‘red carpet’ approach at Icon,” she said of Reece. “I really wasn’t sure how she managed to do it all, but she did.”

Summer Bowie, community manager at Women Who Influence, said that she knew the first time she met Reece that she wanted to work with her. 

“Her favorite mantra is, ‘What you do makes a difference,’” Bowie said. “She tries to incorporate that into her work as well and into the minds of other people.” That ethic, combined with her bold confidence, makes Reeece the perfect work partner, she said. 

“She’s very determined,” Bowie said of Reece. “She’s very bold and unapologetic. She has a great work drive. We’re kind of like yin and yang. She has a great work ethic and her reason for doing this just drew me in.” 

Reece’s next big project is a new documentary that takes a deeper look at the challenges Black women face when trying to navigate large corporations. The film will be titled “Black Women Surviving Corporate.” 

“The documentary will involve different corporate professionals from different backgrounds,” Reece explained. “We will interview the individuals. The majority of individuals featured and the majority of individuals filmed will be Black.” Reece is in the crowd-funding stage for this project, with $10,000 already raised. She’s hoping to start production within the year, and premiere the film at another gala event. 

It’s just another big project for a woman who may have been disappointed in her dreams but instead has set her sights on something much bigger. 

“In my own life, I try to make the work environment a safe haven,” Reece said. “I encourage open dialogue and respect of everyone’s space, personality and time. I try to keep the conversation going, asking, ‘Is there something I need to work on?’ I’m focused on making sure people feel like they are working well with each other, with respecting everyone’s unique contributions. That’s how I think work should be.”