TurningPoint
Nobody likes to think they're crazy or stupid, but that's where I'm at right now.
Yesterday was...really out there for me. I went in to work with one worldview and came out with another, and I learned that not only was I unaware of a key, crucial fact about my job, but I'd also failed to pick up on signals that I was overstepping my mandate. This is one area where I'm usually right on the money: I can read people well, or at least I thought I could.
No, the job's not in immediate jeopardy. It was thankfully early enough to where my (acting) manager was able to intervene and lay down the essential knowledge, but I can't deny that in the end, it looks to a lot of people like I was doing my job poorly, and yet I thought I was balancing things according to the work at hand. It's fucked up. Through a combination of haphazard, distracted training, terrible information flow, I had a dangerously distorted perception of the amount of actual work that I faced.
My document queue is managed through an in-house system, put together by developers with limited English skills. Information is disparate and compartmentalized, and many are poorly labeled. I'd only ever seen my personal view to the document queue, which has only had, at most, ten documents at a time. Everybody complained about "The Backlog," but nobody ever quantified it. Request come into a holding queue and another coworker then delegated the cases as needed. Cases have been coming in regularly and steadily, so it seemed like the system worked nominally well.
But I didn't know this: the delegator didn't immediately delegate the cases for the business unit I support; rather she let them trickle into my inbox based on what she felt I could handle. It turns out all the focus on "the backlog" was not the exagerrated tech-writer bitching, there is a massive queue of documents I didn't know were there. Nobody ever told me and there is no documentation or training materials. So while I was focusing on process stuff, there was a massive backlog of cases that made it look as though I was slacking and playing around with other stuff.
My manager had a rough time understanding how I couldn't know where the queue was, which is how it is when assumptions rule the day. My training was based on what I could find out to complete the task at hand: it's the way the company and group work. In true spirit, I'll give it an acronym: TBR. Task-based Reaction. It was only a day before when I learned there are actually two additional types of documents my group puts out that I don't know how to do. It's set up so that it's the trainee's responsibility to find out what he needs to know, not for the team to present consistent information about the environment.
The thing is so broken, it hurts to even describe.
What's more, it turns out a lot of the encouragement and poisitive reenforcement from other corners was actually...placation. On Thursday, I fired off an email to some others in the marketing team highlighting a new feature of Acrobat 7; I'd gotten a positive response from the group's manager, but I don't think it was genuine. My manager pointed it out and said, "Jason, you realize these things get back to me," as though I had some reason why I thought that it shouldn't or wouldn't. It seems that email was seen as a brazen overstepping of my...my compartment. Coupled with the perception that I wasn't working very fast, it seemed a measure of brazen audacity.
I feel embarassed and humiliated; but I know my part in this mess, where my tunnel vision and belief in solutions-over-bandaids kept me from making some crucial exploratory steps to cover what my training should've told me on day 1. That said, I'm thus adjusting. I do owe a couple of apologies, but the damage isn't irreparable. But man, this wound hurts like a bitch, and I've a lot of licking left to do.
Yesterday was...really out there for me. I went in to work with one worldview and came out with another, and I learned that not only was I unaware of a key, crucial fact about my job, but I'd also failed to pick up on signals that I was overstepping my mandate. This is one area where I'm usually right on the money: I can read people well, or at least I thought I could.
No, the job's not in immediate jeopardy. It was thankfully early enough to where my (acting) manager was able to intervene and lay down the essential knowledge, but I can't deny that in the end, it looks to a lot of people like I was doing my job poorly, and yet I thought I was balancing things according to the work at hand. It's fucked up. Through a combination of haphazard, distracted training, terrible information flow, I had a dangerously distorted perception of the amount of actual work that I faced.
My document queue is managed through an in-house system, put together by developers with limited English skills. Information is disparate and compartmentalized, and many are poorly labeled. I'd only ever seen my personal view to the document queue, which has only had, at most, ten documents at a time. Everybody complained about "The Backlog," but nobody ever quantified it. Request come into a holding queue and another coworker then delegated the cases as needed. Cases have been coming in regularly and steadily, so it seemed like the system worked nominally well.
But I didn't know this: the delegator didn't immediately delegate the cases for the business unit I support; rather she let them trickle into my inbox based on what she felt I could handle. It turns out all the focus on "the backlog" was not the exagerrated tech-writer bitching, there is a massive queue of documents I didn't know were there. Nobody ever told me and there is no documentation or training materials. So while I was focusing on process stuff, there was a massive backlog of cases that made it look as though I was slacking and playing around with other stuff.
My manager had a rough time understanding how I couldn't know where the queue was, which is how it is when assumptions rule the day. My training was based on what I could find out to complete the task at hand: it's the way the company and group work. In true spirit, I'll give it an acronym: TBR. Task-based Reaction. It was only a day before when I learned there are actually two additional types of documents my group puts out that I don't know how to do. It's set up so that it's the trainee's responsibility to find out what he needs to know, not for the team to present consistent information about the environment.
The thing is so broken, it hurts to even describe.
What's more, it turns out a lot of the encouragement and poisitive reenforcement from other corners was actually...placation. On Thursday, I fired off an email to some others in the marketing team highlighting a new feature of Acrobat 7; I'd gotten a positive response from the group's manager, but I don't think it was genuine. My manager pointed it out and said, "Jason, you realize these things get back to me," as though I had some reason why I thought that it shouldn't or wouldn't. It seems that email was seen as a brazen overstepping of my...my compartment. Coupled with the perception that I wasn't working very fast, it seemed a measure of brazen audacity.
I feel embarassed and humiliated; but I know my part in this mess, where my tunnel vision and belief in solutions-over-bandaids kept me from making some crucial exploratory steps to cover what my training should've told me on day 1. That said, I'm thus adjusting. I do owe a couple of apologies, but the damage isn't irreparable. But man, this wound hurts like a bitch, and I've a lot of licking left to do.
Hang in there, Jason. You'll be able to capitalize on your "visionary" strenghs in due time, but it comes slowly. You're an excellent resource, and they know it. Just take it one day at a time.
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