I’m actually not that particularly thrilled with my work life these days, and have not been for quite some time.  Over the span of the last year and a half, there has been a lot of transition in my department and team, other than the primary software that we’re using to accomplish the same job.  Despite my promotion, it has come with a lot of baggage a lot of strings attached, and I’d be lying if I didn’t at times wish I were still more on the ground, actually doing things, instead of feeling like a managerial stooge in comparison, bouncing from meeting to meeting and spending the vast majority of my days locked inside Outlook, typing away at seemingly redundant emails and trying not to play a game that I don’t like playing in the first place (office politics).

However, among the numerous changes that have occurred, the one that makes my face go 😐 more than anything is the leadership above in me in the hierarchy of the department.  And to quickly summarize is primarily the fact that my previous superior(s) were much more relaxed and gave me autonomy to do my job, and had a more “as long as the job gets done” attitude, the same cannot be said about those who have taken their place.

I legitimately spend more time on any given work day “being coached” on how to subsequently “coach” my reports on how to properly use Outlook calendars to the specific preference of one person, and getting litanies of emails asking me questions about the questionable habits of some of the people beneath me, with all sorts of passive aggressive remarks about how they were clearly not coached appropriately to company standards, and how lots of behaviors need to be corrected.

I genuinely feel at times like I’m in Office Space, where I’m getting chewed out for not putting cover sheets on my TPS reports from various sources, and despite the very clear rule about having 25 pieces of flair, I’m getting spoken to repeatedly about how I, and my reports should be expected to do more than the minimum, AKA a job description.

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