Back from the Edge

Ah, the new job. I've noted in the past that I've taken a new job, and if I understand the company policy, I'm not allowed to say who I work for on this blog because I haven't run it by corporate communications and I might tarnish our "brand" - it's all about being "brand" where I work. I'll refer to my employer by the letters CCRB - an acronym for "concentric circled retail behemoth" - for short. Not to be confused with RBTSWW - "retail behemoth that starts with 'W'". We're definitely not RBTSWW. They're evil. We're good. Anyway...

I think there is no worse feeling for me than to have a feeling and not know why I have that feeling. So, right now, at this moment, I'm experiencing dissatisfaction with my new job. I'm finally writing about this because sometimes writing about it helps. Or at least it helps me figure out what's wrong.

So what's wrong? Oh my, I don't even know where to start...

1. This IT organization boasts more than 3,000 employees. Change is constant. This creates several problems for me, the foremost being that I don't relish meeting 3,000 people. Meeting people is awkward. There's not much I dislike more than awkward social situations. I find myself walking down 15 floors of stairs rather than take a long elevator ride with one of these new acquaintances.

Even worse, social networking is highly encouraged. It is even one of the tenets of the 4 pillars of employee development - the E's of excellence - namely "maximizing relationships". From what I've been able to figure out, "maximizing relationships" means getting people to do your work for you. That may be my cynicism breaking through. I would be more in line with something like "nurturing relationships" because the word maximizing implies use - as in, I'm going to use you for something I need, whereas nurturing implies some level of work on my part to make the whole grow. Which brings me to the next ... opportunity.

2. Language. CCRB has its own language. Most corporations do these days. It's the Stepfordian adherence that frightens me. The people who've been around for a long time, I believe, have actually eliminated the word "weakness" from their vocabularies, replacing it with the much friendlier "opportunity". In fact, "opportunity" means anything negative. The only thing it doesn't mean is ... well ... opportunity. Also, we don't "team up" with people, we "partner". What is this desire to turn nouns into verbs? We also "status" with people.

3. Feedback. What would happen if every time you opened your mouth everyone within earshot felt the need to provide feedback on your utterances? It would get really f**king annoying, wouldn't it? Welcome to CCRB - aka Feedback Central. Giving feedback is encouraged. Unfortunately, giving useful, insightful, constructive feedback isn't taught. Some people are good at it, but many aren't. Seeking feedback is also encouraged. As far as I can tell, I'll not be seeking much feedback. I'll be teaching people how to give constructive feedback.

4. My specific job - aka The Meeting. Before I jump into the aspects of my job that I dislike, please let me start by saying that I understand this will probably sound like so much whining. Ooh, my job is so tough, yada yada yada. About a billion people on this planet would give up one or both gonads to be in my position - happily! So that said, I embark...

As in any corporation, there are layers of management between any worker and the people who run the company - the Chief Something Officers. I report through the Chief Information Officer. Between me and the CIO, there is my boss, her boss, his boss, her boss, and then a Vice President, and then the CIO. How many is that? 5? 6? Depends how you count it. Anyway, in ascending order the titles go - expendable worker drone (me), manager, group manager, senior group manager, director, VP, CIO.

The 800 pound gorilla effect - defined as the point in which expendable worker drones become intimidated by management so much so that their speech becomes unsteady and their movements rigid - generally starts at the senior group manager level. So you can have a meeting with managers and group managers and the workers tend to behave as normal, but once the SGM enters the room, people sit straighter, strictly adhere to the language rules of #2, etc.

Okay, so that's the background you need to understand my job. I work in Problem Management. A somewhat meaningless term outside the inner circle of large Information Technology organizations. Our job, as a group, is to work with the rest of the organization to minimize the impact OR prevent problems. At CCRB, Problems are defined as, in simple terms, unplanned global outages.

Here's an example: for several hours 2 days before Christmas none of our cash registers were accepting debit cards. That's bad. Something obviously went wrong. My job (and there are 4 others in my group who do the same thing) is to work with the teams that support all the software that has to do with debit transactions and figure out why it happened and how to make it so it doesn't happen again.

By the time I get involved, the problem is already recovered - that is, the cash registers were again accepting debit cards as a valid form of payment before I even get involved. There are several other organizations whose purpose it is to get the problem recovered. I just work on resolution - ie, the stuff to make it never happen again.

(Small digression - is that a niche within a niche, tucked into a pigeon-hole, or what?)

This isn't the bad part of the job, by the way. This is the good part. You'll know when I get to the bad part. Trust me.

On average, we have about 15 of these "incidents" per week. You don't read about them in the newspaper (hopefully), but they happen. If that seems like a lot, consider this: we've had a 10% year-over-year drop for 3 consecutive years. So it used to be worse. (If you want to see an incident for yourself sometime, I suggest trying one of our store kiosks or shopping on our website. But you didn't hear that from me.)

Once my group has completed analysis, we assign actions that will prevent recurrence of this problem. And then we find a speaker for the incident. To speak at The Meeting.

Each Friday, all of the SGMs and above (including the CIO and all of her direct reports) meet for 45 minutes to review the previous week's problems. Each "owner" of the most egregious of these incidents - there are usually about 5 - is asked by my group to speak at this meeting, ostensibly to share "learnings" about the incident so that no one else suffers the same fate.

Let me put the meeting in my somewhat more pragmatic terms - each Friday, the 75 most powerful people in the organization meet and listen to the managers of the people whose groups caused the previous week's most egregious and impactful problems.

Needless to say, these managers do not relish this "opportunity". Why? Let me count the ways:

1. Public speaking - in front of the very people who will determine your future at CCRB. No pressure there.
2. Implied blame - "owning" an incident means, for all practical purposes, that it was your group's fault. And from experience I can tell you that about 60% of all problems could have been prevented with better planning and testing. So the message is typically about how their group f**ked up. Sweet!
3. Most managers aren't involved in the day to day operations of the group, so they end up spending a considerable amount of time trying to draw from their subordinates the information they need to convey at this meeting. These IT geeks don't communicate well to begin with, especially with the intricate technical details surrounding these complex applications or hardware. Sometimes it's like waiting for the proverbial room of monkeys with typewriters to accidentally type the complete works of Shakespeare.

Because of all this, many managers try to wriggle out of these speaking opportunities. Frankly, I'd be concerned about them if they didn't.

Here's my job - this meeting. Yep. Okay, it's half my job. I prepare the presentation, convince the speakers of the importance of having them speak, then prepare the executive that actually runs the meeting. He's a VP. Like all sycophants, I hang on his every word, jump with great vigor when he says jump, and never tell him how much work goes into this meeting. Bad news rarely makes it to him.

With any job there are rules. These are mine:

1. When "convincing" a manager of the importance of their speaking engagement, I am not allowed to invoke the name of the VP. He doesn't want you to speak. He with the power, who inspires fear. Nope. Me - I want them to speak. I envision most of these managers thinking, "And you are? Nobody? An expendable worker drone? Ri-ight." I am allowed to invoke the name of my group, but that really sounds like a copout. But it's all I have. These managers (frequently group managers and even some SGMs) outrank me and will likely determine my future with CCRB. No pressure there.
2. This particular VP is even a more finicky writer than I am. I am responsible for the content of a 20+ page presentation, that is really a compilation from about 5-10 sources. So I play editor to all the contributors. I am the nitpicker. "Could you change that word, please? It is the wrong 'too' - it should be two O's, not t-w-o." I can't believe I actually have to tell people this, but I do.
3. I'm copy machine guy. We hand out paper copies of the presentation, so on Thursday nights (or Friday mornings) you'll find me hogging the department printer. Making copies. That Electrical Engineering degree is really paying off!
4. I have butterflies every Friday because, if a speaker doesn't show up, it's my fault. It's not really my fault - it's a CLM (career limiting move) for the person who didn't show up - but everyone looks at me and mouths "did you talk to so-and-so?" while I file through my week's conversations to try to remember specifically that I had.
5. Hanging around for feedback. I find an excuse to hang out in the meeting room until the VP leaves to see if he has any feedback to take into next week's meeting. I always pre-arrange for someone to fake a conversation with me until he leaves. How's that for planning?

So that's it. That's my whining. It doesn't seem so bad now that I've written about it.

Because this post is so long, I've skipped some less important details. In fact, I've made some improvements to this whole process that has made The Meeting almost bearable. I'll write about that next time.

I hope you've enjoyed this ride, because it has been therapeutic for me. Thanks for your patience.