Sometimes the Worm Turns

If you talk to enough people, some of them may just hear you.

I was fortunate to share a car trip with a colleague. We had to present to one of the functions about our respective areas of expertise: he on shopper trends, me on customer trends. The car drive took three hours each way and we talked about our backgrounds. During this chat, he mentioned that he could use a person like me in his team.

When we got back to the office, he got the ball rolling. Now, I’ve had discussions with his boss and it looks like I may be switching departments soon. I don’t want to count my chickens before they hatch, and it’s a long way to go before I sign a new contract, it’s evidence that doing something can make a difference. Sometimes, it’s also about a bit of luck.

When Did I Start to Lose Interest?

 

I suppose my motivation started to ebb this year when my function was cut from Marketing and rolled into Sales. Okay, I wasn’t a pure marketer and worked more in analytics. Functionally I could have sat in either. My peeve is that there was an inferred promise that I would work for Marketing, investigating consumer trends. Alas, not to be. The change meant an alteration to:

• career progression plans
• skill building
• circle of colleagues

For me this change was unexpected and unexplained. I had no say in the move and no reason was given. Since then, I’ve been treading water and waiting for a chance to leave. In hindsight, I should have looked for an earlier escape or sought reasons. In the end, I chickened out and opted to do the best thing for myself.

I know I should I have been the proactive one, seeking reasons for decisions that affected my motivation. I should have been the bigger one.

Hear Ye! Hear Ye!

There used to be a regular bulletin circulating through the sales and marketing departments of my company announcing whenever someone had joined, left or if there was something worth celebrating.

These days, these announcements are only sent to those departments affected, given that they’re mostly about departures. The HR team mentioned that these had to be kept “in house”. Okay, for a large organization I can understand that the team in supply chain wouldn’t give a damn about the latest departures or arrivals in the call center. It would be junk mail to them. In my opinion, if two teams are separate but have sufficient reason to be connected (like Marketing and Sales) then I think the announcements should still be shared.

In any case, if a person from Marketing decides to leave and only his/her immediate team receive the message, it would be pointless. Everyone knows that they’re leaving anyway.

My suspicion here is that due to the number of departures, the company doesn’t want to paint a picture of a ship slowly losing its passengers. The question here is whether this is a sound strategy. Is it good to know if other departments are unhappy? If so, for whom?

The Pensky File

I was recently given some work to do by the Hi-Pot* in our team. We’re peers but I figured that being in his good books would perhaps reflect some of his shine to my tainted career. I was wrong. Mr Hi-Pot was looking to offload the scum from his work pile. His close relationship to the Director locked me in since he had “a word” about my delivering the appropriate outcome. So, I’m stuck doing garbage and unable to escape because of the obligation to my unrepentant superior.

The scope of the project is to assess “the degree of risk” within the operation of the sales function. The first measure of which was a survey filled in by the sales team itself. I scoured through the responses only to find the the Director had over-written them. Apparently this was so that the “right” answer came up during the external audit.

There are three wrongs here: my acceptance of bad work; the palming off of said bad work by someone who should be well-intentioned; and a superior with poor integrity. It’s not good for the company.

*Hi-Pot = High Potential (also Golden Boy or the Director’s be-yatch) 

The Vicious Cycle: Being Bitter At Work Doesn’t Make Things Better

My current job has no real description. The work is mostly to do with numbers: how they can be made a better shade of black and how they can be re-engineered into a pretty graph or poignant table in a presentation. I know I’m good at this. My problem is that I’ve been doing it for a few years and I really don’t know where it’s going to take me. I’ve been cast into a familiar groove (“the numbers guy”) by the powers that be and it is making me bitter.

I guess it all started when I was able to convince my superiors that I needed a job with more adventure; looking at uncharted areas and pioneer a new view for the company. I guess I could talk about these dreams better than I could practically make them come to life.

So now, I’m stuck. I’ve been doing more or less the same work for three years (the last 12 months have been utter torture). I have learnt nothing new; my bosses don’t understand what I could potentially do (bad communication on my part) and they don’t know what they could give me to do — other than the numbers. So, still stuck.

The trap is that some skills are hard to find and when unearthed will be plumbed for all they’re worth. This is when the stone grows mossy. You get angry about the lack of progression and the monotony of it all, but the superiors don’t care. The job’s getting done. You’ve added nothing to your skills so it’s difficult to take those advancing steps. The blackness creeps in, you get despondent, work less hard and you settle into your rut.

I’ve had this cloud over me for too long. Sick of it all, I decided to take charge. I want a rewarding career and am sick of being a corporate nobody. By chance, I came across this . It has made a world of difference to my attitude. In the end, planning my escape begins with this positive frame of mind: I am responsible for my happiness at work.