My former manager is no longer a manager, having been demoted with extreme prejudice after one of our teammates moved to the Ukraine from Poland and refusing to move back. Our manager had been promising teammate (now ex-teammate: the guy has left the company) that HR and Legal were engaged to help with visa fuckery.
My manager hadn't spoken to either of these departments. Moreover, we don't have a legal presence in the Ukraine. In an ideal world, he would have left the building with his former employee, but unfortunately, I’m still not allowed to deport management to the former Soviet Bloc.
Over December, we interviewed candidates for a replacement. Two, actually. The first flunked out, and the second was a senior program manager with no managerial experience that I’d worked with before. Senior PM was from a business unit on the side of the house my group was founded to interface with. She’s a badass. Faced with the decision of finding a new job or dealing with the uncertain, I infodumped the whole horrible saga of our team, the inept bullying of my manager, the Ukrainian fiasco, and my Californian colleague’s hellish situation. She still threw her hat in.
According to the head of our program management office (who has temporarily been managing our team while I and the Californian hiss at our former manager from as far from him as we can get) the decision re: new manager fell entirely on me and Californian colleague.
We hired her, thank fuck.
Today I sat down with her and provided my full work breakdown, briefed her on my most challenging (and most rewarding) integration program, told her about the oncoming one, and outlined what I’d like to hand off to her.
She nodded, listened, and said “how can I help? I’m doing X, Y, and Z with our interface with the other business unit and our higher management and we’re getting governance mechanisms into place. It sounds like your priorities are basically correct. I see my job as mainly removing obstacles for you and helping you scope your work appropriately.”
“I need visibility on this project, also, I need to hand this off to another team in the program management office, and it’s not well documented because I’ve been overworked.”
“I’ll set up the meeting. How often do you want to meet?”
“As needed. Also, can you go talk to Director? She’s effectively been managing me this last year and may be able to give you a better picture of the large, difficult, program and my involvement in it.”
“I will do that. Ad-hoc sounds good. Thanks for making time to meet with me!”
What I want out of a manager is cover fire and liaising so I don’t have to liaise. I can do so, but most often, I want someone to take the organizational politics of my chain of command off my plate so I can go partake of the organizational politics involved in doing interesting and differently political work. The good things about this interaction are:
- Validation that I’m prioritizing correctly and support on removing the things not pertinent to my current role.
- Offering to handle and handling these things.
- Providing political support towards me loading down some other poor schlub with the work I don’t want to do.
- Asking me what I need and what will make me comfortable in our interactions as an employee and manager.
- Providing high-level managerial support for the team overall and political support for us having better ways of getting our job done.
- No goddamn bullying, static, power games, or other weird social shit.
- She’s excited to make things better, support the team, and do cool things with upper management. This is also a huge thing for her, career-wise, and she seems extremely happy, even knowing she’s inherited what was a merry dumpster bonfire.
I went home today feeling much less stressed than I have in a while.