Mel Silva voluntarily took a pay cut. Twice. And her parents thought she’d lost her mind.

The first time, she left a senior role in financial services to run a team of three or four people – “the equivalent of a startup” – at Fairfax Digital. The second time, she joined Google as an individual contributor with no team at all.

“It took 10 months to get that job,” she says. “God knows how many interviews… [and] it was a pay cut and a step back.”

Her partner – who also worked in tech – told her she was getting on a rocket ship. Her folks had a different view.

“My parents thought I was crazy,” she says. “In my logical brain it didn’t feel like a big risk at all. But when I had to explain it to other people, or say it out loud, it felt like, what are you doing?”

Mel is now the Vice President and Managing Director of Google Australia and New Zealand. Evidently, those backward steps had her heading in the right direction.

Speaking on the latest season of FW’s award-winning podcast Too Much: The Switch, Mel says her career has been anything but linear – and encourages others to dream beyond a straight trajectory.

Image credit: Louise Kennerley

“I mean, this is the number one topic of every single career coaching conversation I have. People get locked – like, serious tunnel vision – on that role up there and that ‘one step up’ role or that ‘one promotion up’ role. And I just feel like it’s a really limiting mindset,” she tells host Brianna Blackett.

“If you don’t want your boss’s job, you’d better start thinking about what your next lattice move is – and I say the word ‘lattice’, not ‘ladder’, very intentionally. Because sometimes the next move is going to be one across.”

Mel had spent 15 years climbing the ranks in financial services when, one day, she looked up and realised she didn’t want any of the roles above her. It was the first time this had happened – and it was the only sign she needed to make a switch.

This was 2006, when the internet was having a big moment. Twitter launched, Facebook unveiled its news feed and businesses were starting to build an online presence.

“You could see the opportunity. It was just everywhere – you could feel it. And so I kind of knew that if I did want to take a pivot, there would be lots of different choices.”

 “You fall off the horse and you’ve got to get back on. You’ve got to have the grit and resilience.”

Stepping down from Head of Marketing at Citibank, she spent a year leading Fairfax Digital’s Direct Access business – an online investment supermarket – before making her move to Google Australia. Mel took another pay cut, started as a financial services specialist supporting the sales team and, nine years later, applied for the managing director role.

She didn’t get it.

“In my mind, I was locked and loaded. This is mine for the taking,” says Mel. “And you have to give yourself that moment to not be happy about it. To be angry and to slam doors and to go home and vent.”

She let herself simmer for a week. Then she asked what came next, was offered two roles and accepted the one that was, in the words of her sponsor, “a risk”. Mel spent the next two and a half years working in Singapore, leading strategy and operations, and learning about Google from the outside in.

“I am so grateful I didn’t get that job,” she says. “The job I ended up taking gave me a laundry list of experiences I would never ever have had. One thousand percent made me better at the job I have now.”

For anyone who is mid-career, feeling stuck or like they’ve made a misstep, Mel says career paths are never smooth.

“There are bumps. You fall off the horse and you’ve got to get back on. You’ve got to have the grit and resilience,” she adds.

“There was a particularly rough patch for me in my career where I was getting that feeling on a Sunday afternoon, at two o’clock, where you’re like, oh, I’ve got to go to work. And I’ve never been like that… I’ve always been able to find something that gets me motivated and I was just not there at all.

“[But] in hindsight, I look back and there was a person I met in that job who ended up being the person who referred me to Google. I needed that experience — not just to learn and grow, but to meet that person… It all comes together in the end, folks.”