Monsoon season — indoors, anyway
So yesterday, we had this mother of a thunderstorm. In fact, everything *but* my mother blew off the balcony. It was great fun trying to rescue my plastic adirondack chairs and one of the screens from my floor-to-ceiling windows as they hung precariously over the balcony in 65-mph winds. GOOD TIMES!
Needless to say that the fire alarm went off for a good eight solid hours. Just in my apartment, go figure. Or maybe it was all the corner units above and below me. I don’t know. I was losing my shit after hour four.
This working from home crap is such an epic fail right now. Between ears melting from faulty smoke detectors and power outages from Mother Nature-induced events, I’m at a loss. I really am.
So anyway, I am keeping busy with reading blogs on my iPad, since there’s not much else to do when the cable’s out. I found a new blog and, thus, a new article I want to talk about: “5 Ways to Lead With Trust.”
My big takeaway from it is that you hire people to do a damn job already. You don’t follow them or shadow them into perpetuity. You ask them to run a department, then let them run the goddamned thing. Get the updates at a later date.
Yep, I’m on fire about this one.
On my way out of my final full-time gig, apparently they didn’t shut off my e-mail access till after the all-staff note went out to tell them I was shitcanned. I was already too hurt by the situation to be any more hurt by the letter. But it insinuated that there were too many cooks in the kitchen and we were getting rid of the one who had studied at other places.
Which, I’d rather have the one with the impressive resume. But, you know, fuck me. Keep the school lunchlady as the curator of fine cuisine. Mystery-meat day, every day!
They were right about too many cooks. Because you couldn’t have a meeting without the whole staff. And I mean the WHOLE staff. We rescheduled meetings around other meetings to make sure everyone could be there.
And then when they were trying to document me out the door, it was for lack of meeting with them on non-meeting time. I was so meeting’d out by the end, I truly didn’t know whether I was coming or going.
Anyway, the article I’m posting today is one I really recommend everyone read, particularly this part:
“For example, a seemingly innocuous email that says, “I’d like to take a look at that before it goes to the client,” lacks context from you, and can be over-read as, “I don’t trust your judgment when it comes to a final product going out to a client.”
If you intend to give the person that feedback, then maybe you need to have a direct conversation about it.”
I know I didn’t shine there. I tried. Oh, how I wanted to. But what made me shine elsewhere was being trusted, which they informed me I had to earn. But how, when nothing was good enough toward the end?
I had more freedom during my 90-day probationary period — it was really a mindfuck to keep smiling even though I saw the chalk outline of my independence and creativity on the floor next to me every single day thereafter.
I mean, it doesn’t matter anymore. But to this day, I still wonder how I could have saved it when it all started going so very wrong. I mean, I’m on fabulous terms with nearly all my exes, relationship- and work-wise, and it pains me that it ended so unsatisfyingly.
It’s not that there needed to be so many cooks in the kitchen. I really tried to run a department and let everyone else do whatever their jobs were. I remember calling a planning session with my full staff and that meeting being “crashed” by those who weren’t “invited.” My. God. Grow up, people. I didn’t give a shit who showed up to the fucking pow-wow. I’d already outlined what I wanted to share — plus, I’d sent that list to the top of the organization three days earlier.
There were no goddamned surprises. No planned mutiny. No NOTHING other than, hey people, in order to move forward, we HAVE to back-and-fill the following identified potholes.
In fact, one of the “crashers” FELL ASLEEP in the planning session. Which I found rather endearing, truth be told, as proof-positive that I was right to not expand the guest list to anyone above my rank and station.
Oh well. Live and learn. I know everyone at the top is paranoid. I don’t WANT to be at the top, if that’s what it causes. I just wanted to do good work right where I was, with a team I felt was more than capable of doing that good work.
But I would bet dollars to doughnuts (mmm, donuts…) that everything is the same way I found it a year ago. Sure, they did hire some duds. And got rid of them. Hell, I fired one of them myself. But the stigma carried over to the rest of us who were searching so hard for a way to shine without pissing anyone off in the process.
Again, oh well. I truly am sorry if I did piss people off, or not perform to their expectations. But my heart got broken, too. And I don’t know how to make that hole heal because there is nothing left to do to even try to make it right.