Hopefully you read my note about an approach to my blog unfolding… I am going to go through the alphabet (perhaps not always in order), on a particular topic.
Though I am relying on my experiences to select the word or topic for each of my posts, I am in no way encouraging people to follow my lead… Simply, I am using this blog as a form of catharsis (and it is cheaper than therapy!). If you like it, great. If you don’t, at least I got my thoughts written out and sent down the river.
Let me start by owning up that I have a marketing background. As such, I tend to use buzzwords – a lot more than I would like too. In fact the buzzwords start to infuse themselves into your everyday vocabulary (much like how they suggest starting with hot pink socks will have you wearing a hot pink sweater in no time as you get used to seeing yourself in that color). Hopefully they don’t bother you as much as they do my husband!
My “Alpha Series 1”, let’s call it, will be focused on the Workplace (a serious source of my stress these days and the culprit that gave me high blood pressure).
“A” is for Anger Management
I know that my office is not unlike others around the country. Good people started a small firm doing something they loved and grew it up from a seedling to become a major player in our industry. Even when I started here, there were only six of us in a single office. Now we are a bustling 20 people in three offices.
Like any small start-up, the original core team kept their “day” jobs and wanted to branch out. When they were successful enough or felt they could garner market share, they decided to pursue their dream full-time. As people tend to do, they stayed true to their core competency and handled their part of the business REALLY well. They have been a huge success and deserve the accolades they have received.
The challenge or opportunity for any small business is to realize when it is they become more than a small business and to adjust accordingly. Our firm stayed in the small business mindset for more than a little too long, and we are still struggling to ramp up from those days of humble beginnings. Never was any thought given to a long-term plan or making sure there would be a necessary support structure for the business that was hatched.
(If you are wondering about the anger, I really am getting to it. It is just important to share this background…)
As I said, in numbers we have grown incrementally and carefully in the time I have been here. That said, we have not always grown it smart. There are several sides to the business that have been handled carefully (management), a second team that has been allowed to hire in plenty of junior team members to train and nurture, and third team seems to add personnel at will, then yet a fourth group has been left to fend for themselves and “figure it out”. I am sure it will not be a stretch to believe that I fall in “Group 4”.
Where I fit into this Group is as a long-time employee who has seen not one person added at our level in nine long years. To give some perspective, Group 2 has gone from three to nine just in the last few years and Group 3 doubled from two to four last year alone.
Group 4 handles administrative activities. For me personally, that means sales, sales support, customer service, trip scheduling, exhibit booths, and anything else that does not fit squarely within another person’s domain. And absolutely, positively answering the phone! (We certainly can’t have the important people do that…)
Though I won’t go into the gory details, of which there are plenty, what I want to address in this blog post is that for the sake of my well-being and sanity, I have been working to perfect a better way to way to deal with my anger. I may still be angry but I need to make sure that I direct it at the correct target. It is not the fault of my colleagues in Group 2 or 3 that they have leisure time during the day. Someone with more power than them felt that it was more useful to vote with our firm’s dollars to make sure that they had coverage while I have no backup.
Also a recent change to “getting my feelings put out there” for my bosses is that on my annual evaluation I wrote that my biggest accomplishment last year was “Survival”. Perhaps one of them read it, but likely they didn’t. For years they have been asking me to write a section in my review about what I would like to be doing in the next year. Since I back up at least five people, I asked for a backup for my work (which seemed like a very reasonable request to me). After being turned down or more likely ignored in the bulk of a decade for my request, I just stopped writing anything at all in this section. This should have been a big signal to my bosses, yet here we are 3/4 of a year later and nothing. Just the crickets…
Over and above any of my other methods for dealing with my angry work self, I am making sure that there are more things for me to concentrate on than my job. Now you will see me more involved with organizations, community projects, and the long-neglected scrapbooking that needs a few decades of work is getting dusted off.
I find ways to tune out to more of the noise at my end – maybe they’ll hire someone and maybe they won’t, but they get enough of my time and thoughts and taking my health is not an option. The customers come first, and everyone after that will have to wait his turn. Sure, maybe I could do that project today, but perhaps it can wait as well as anything else can.
There is no doubt that I think it is more than fair that we should all get angry now and then, and frankly it does propel us forward at times. Hopefully you will likewise have some luck when you bring the focus back around to yourself, redefine how you fit in the firm, and then what you can do to keep your life from being solely firm-focused. A friend told me once that even though I may feel there is something I need to do at the office on the weekend, if I die they will still only take a week to replace me. Sounds like a watered-down quote from somewhere, but I think she had a good point!
eekinmycreek 