I Didn't Start in a Corner Office
INNERTONE™ — BLOG 1 OF 3
I Didn't Start in a Corner Office
By Marilyn Torres · Founder, InnerTone™
The Retail Floor
I didn't start in a corner office. I started on a retail floor.
No title. No corner office. No assistant. Just a floor full of people who needed direction, a sales target that never moved, and customers who walked in carrying everything their day had already handed them before they got to me. Some were kind. Some were not. Most were just human — tired, distracted, looking for something even if they couldn't always name what it was.
That's where I learned the thing that has followed me through every role I've ever held, every team I've ever led, every organization I've ever served. I learned it not in a classroom or a leadership seminar or a book about high performance. I learned it standing on a retail floor, watching people, asking questions, and paying attention to what actually moved the needle when it came to how human beings treat each other.
The lesson was simple and it has never stopped being true: how you treat people matters more than almost anything else you will ever do in a professional setting. More than your strategy. More than your budget. More than your org chart or your KPIs or your quarterly targets. The way you show up for the people around you — the ones above you, the ones beside you, and especially the ones below you — that is the thing that defines whether a workplace works or quietly breaks the people inside it.
I carried that lesson with me when I left retail and stepped into the nonprofit world. And I have been carrying it ever since.
The Question That Changed Everything
I have always been curious. Not in a performative way — not the kind of curiosity that asks questions to seem engaged while already composing the answer. Real curiosity. The kind that genuinely wants to know. The kind that looks at a person and wonders what their morning was like before they walked into this meeting. The kind that looks at a problem and asks not just what went wrong but why, and what the why behind the why might be.
Curiosity saved me more times than confidence ever did.
Early in my nonprofit career I was managing a team that was struggling. Deadlines were slipping. Morale was low. The easy read was that people weren't performing. The curious read — the one I had to slow down enough to actually pursue — was that people weren't performing because something underneath the surface wasn't working. So I started asking questions. Not performance review questions. Not corrective action questions. Real ones. How are you doing? What do you need that you don't currently have? What's getting in your way that I might not be able to see from where I'm standing?
The answers changed everything. Not because they were dramatic. But because asking them at all — genuinely asking, and then genuinely listening — shifted something in how the team related to me and to each other. People started showing up differently when they felt like someone in the building actually wanted to know how they were doing.
That experience shaped how I lead. It shaped how I built programs. It shaped how I think about organizations and the invisible systems inside them that either help people thrive or quietly grind them down. And it is the foundation of everything I have built with InnerTone™.
Questions are not a sign of weakness. They are the most underrated leadership tool there is. The leader who asks good questions and actually listens to the answers will always outperform the leader who walks in with all the answers already written.
— Marilyn
Founder, InnerTone™
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