In this episode of High-Powered Fails, former Obama advisor Tina Tchen sits down with Broadly to discuss a time she failed professionally while serving under the Obama administration. In January of 2009, after leaving her corporate job where she worked for 23 years as a lawyer, Tchen joined the White House as the Director of the Office of Public engagement, the president's outreach office."When the president was going to select people for certain positions, we would help out in trying to make sure both that we could find a diverse set of candidates, but also if any of the candidates we were considering had issues related to a statement they'd made in the past, or a particular group affiliation, that we would raise those," she says. During the first year of the Obama administration, the president's advisors, including Tchen, were tasked with just that, vetting candidates for any possibly unsavory affiliations.Eventually, Tchen and other advisors came to a consensus on a recommended hire for the president. President Barack Obama went ahead with their suggestion, and the appointment was announced to the press—but Tchen and the rest of the president's advisors had missed a major red flag, later brought to their attention by the press."When we finally weighed in, the president made a decision, we made the announcement, we just got pounded," she recalls. "A couple hours after the announcement came out, the blowback started."In the aftermath of the announcement, Tchen says she felt awful. "You just get physically ill when the stakes are that high," she says, adding that the feeling didn't wear off for weeks. She spent so much time dwelling on the mistake that eventually, senior advisor Valerie Jarrett and her chief of staff, Michael Strautmanis, approached Tchen to tell her she needed to get over it.Despite her other compelling points, it wasn't until Jarrett pointed out that multiple men who were involved in the appointment had brushed off the mistake weeks ago, that Tchen was ready to get over it. "It kind of got to my sense of gender equality, and that trumped the nausea I had about this," she says. She thought to herself, "If the men aren't beat up about this, then hell if I'm going to be!"Tchen recovered from the mishap and today is a partner at Buckley Sandler, a Chicago law firm, in addition to serving on VICE's Diversity and Inclusion Board.
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