The More Things Change, The More They Stay the Same

Well, it was an interesting work week last week. The original plan was to spend 3 days in Schenectady. On Wednesday, I was supposed to do a video conference with the CIO to discuss the open position. I say original plan, because it didn't turn out that way.

Tuesday went as scheduled. I rented a car and headed out to Schenectady. One of the things I went out to do is find out why we're having morale issues with one of our teams and see if I could make any recommendations to overcome them. I spent most of the day meeting with my staff. I was planning to meet with my counterpart over dinner to discuss the things we couldn't talk about at work. We went out to Applebee's and had a little small talk before I finally asked what was up with the latest person that was leaving the team. She asked if I really wanted to know to which I said "yes".

Oh, my God, I didn't really want to know but I needed to know. Unfortunately, I can't really say what's going on, it's that bad. However, I will say that I did suspect that something wasn't right a LONG time ago and am not surprised to find out what I did. Hopefully we can get this under control very soon, but there's some very political stuff that goes with it so we need to proceed very carefully.

Wednesday started out pretty good. However, we have a project going on in Rochester where we're migrating people's network accounts. We were supposed to migrate about 20 people but only half were. The reason only half were migrated is because my team gave the migration team bad information. The morning meeting we had went something like this:

Them: "What happened?"

Me: "I fucked up. My team wasn't clear on what I wanted them to do."

Them: "How do we keep this from happening again?"

Me: "I'll fix it."

A couple of hours later, I had a quick meeting with my boss to discuss what happened, where I pretty much said there wasn't much to say. My guys blew it and it was my responsibility. He asked me if there was anything pressing keeping me in Schenectady, to which I said no. So he asked me to head back to Rochester and manage the team directly. So by 10:15 am I'd checked out of my hotel and was on the road back home. So much for my trip.

On the plus side, since I left so early, I got a chance to talk to the CIO face to face instead of via video conference. The meeting went well, and we talked about a lot of stuff. I told him of my interest in the job and my philosophy should I run that team. He liked my attitude and views, however, he was waiting to interview for the position until we hire a new assistant director that the position reports to. He wanted that person to interview and select the candidate. However, he did agree that I could take on some additional project work to help out and is going to try and find some things for me to manage. I also got my annual review from my boss and got glowing marks. At a minimum, I'm making a name for myself as reliable, knowledgeable, a team player, and a go to guy. All the things I want to be. So I just need to be patient. All this hard work will pay off soon.

I'm going to refocus on the things I need to get done right now. My focus was a little divided while I was waiting to see where things lie with the open position. But since that's something that will be available in the short term, I've got to keep things going and get our existing projects completed. It's time to rock on and kick some ass.

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