Trying Tuesday (NaBloWriMo)

I woke up this morning thinking it was Friday. For those few and fleeting moments, it was a good day. Then, I realized it was Tuesday, and my spirit sank a little. I had to remind myself that I was awake and breathing; and that's something for which I should be grateful.

My job is becoming more stressful every day. I started working at this position five years ago. Since then, I've had several promotions and job role changes. I like having a home office (we have a wiki group called "I can work in my pajamas"). There's a lot of flexibility in being a tele-commuter. There's also a lot of discipline involved and a lot of what we do doesn't get noticed or appreciated. Tele-commuters work much longer hours than our counterparts. We don't take lunches most of the time and we don't stop at 5pm. We also may get up at 5am and decide to go ahead and get started for the day. Or we'll work until late at night because we don't have to go anywhere and we know that by getting the job done now, it'll help the team. I'm not alone in how I feel. We have a mostly remote team, and many others have told me they feel unappreciated and disrespected by upper management because what they do goes unseen, even if the finished product does not. I'm not sure it isn't time for me to move on. I've been seriously considering it for the majority of this year, and honestly, it started last year with some changes that were made to how we do things. This company just hasn't really been the same since 2008.

One of our upper managers is, to put it nicely, NOT a people manager. She has no skills nor aptitude for it, and we are in a people business (even if it's b2b, it's very people oriented). She has made statements to our sales director like, "I don't know why the threat of someone losing their job isn't motivating". Um, yeah.. it is, but not in the way you think (or want). He actually texted me from a recent conference and said, "Don't leave me with these people!!"

She tried to do a "book club" with all of us in senior management each week, and she started the whole thing off with the most boring presentation you've ever seen. As someone in the learning & development community, I gave her some tips on how to do this kind of thing remotely. So, we were broken up into teams and asked to do a presentation together. Of course, we meet on Mondays, and she waits until Friday afternoon to give us the assignment. This gives us no time whatsoever to set up meetings, work on the assignment,etc... so I volunteered to pull something together for my team. I literally took content from one of the products we sell/deliver and presented it. This upper manager actually began arguing with me that she completely disagreed with the concepts. In other words, she doesn't know best practices AND she also doesn't have a clue about our content. Yeah. It's like that. Again, I'm not alone in my assessment, nor am I the only one who is seriously contemplating leaving. Many of my co-workers have expressed to me that they want out. I've had several direct reports tell me that if I leave, they're leaving too. So, it's a systemic problem and not just me. But, it IS wearing on me.

I've hung in there, mostly because of the economy and having kids/grandkids that needed me to provide for them financially. As they've grown, some moving out to start their own lives, I'm really considering what it is I want to do going forward. The fact that I'll be fifty in a few months is probably a factor as well.
I have a week's vacation at the end of the month. I always take the last week of October off, as it's a very holy time for me. I think I'll use some of that for some serious reflection on whether or not this is where I want to be and what I want to do for the future.






It's already a trying Tuesday. Here's hoping it gets better.