Great Expectations

The recent arrival of a new immediate supervisor at my work place has totally disrupted the status quo and has completely uprooted my work plans. It has been two months since the whole process started, and I am still not able to fully process, nor deal with, the implications of these changes.

I will not go into the details, but in brief, what has happened is this: this new person, in his new role as an "overseer" of his subordinates, tried to bully me into giving up half of the budget that had been allocated under my responsibility. In doing so, he succeeded in completely disrupting the plan of activities that had been developed for the next two years, for one of the activities I was responsible for managing. An activity that I had spent the past three years of my work life developing.

My initial reaction was simply, anger and sadness. In the course of a desperate attempt to try to effectively deal with the problem, my anger and sadness turned into frustration. Frustrated by the fact that my boss (who is above the new immediate supervisor), who claims himself to be a "non-hierarchical guy", has nevertheless decided to give the nod of approval to the actions of this person instead of supporting me, despite acknowledging the extremely tyrannical, dominant and hierarchical way in which the new person has dealt with me. Frustrated that despite the initial demonstration of solidarity, and despite my attempts to patch things up the best way possible, the experts with whom I had worked very closely over a period of couple of years, and for whom I had immense respect for, have decided to severe their affiliation with the activity, disgusted with the way the whole matter has been handled by both this new supervisor and the boss.

Frustrated is probably not the right word; disappointed is not even it; the feeling borders on betrayal. Am I exaggerating? Perhaps I had vested too much into this activity and the experts affiliated with it. Perhaps I had believed too blindly on the boss—the first in over 5 bosses that I have had in my career, whom I had trusted and considered as my "spiritual father". Perhaps this is what you get for taking the status quo for granted.

Although I have been successful in taking back the management responsibility of this activity, the fact remains: the work plans have been disrupted, some of the core experts are gone, and the experts that remain are standing on guard, unsure of what will happen next. I feel as if finding myself being forced to take command of a ship that has come out of a storm, after it been abandoned by the captain, taking the steer with him. I have the ship, but what is there to do? Do I want to do anything with it? Should I simply jump ship as well? Or should I stay, to try to steer the ship in the right direction, under the watchful eyes of the members that remain?

The lesson to be learned? I am not sure. But in considering all the "perhaps" I have mentioned above, it has made me think twice about the wisdom of fully and wholeheartedly committing to work. This, in addition to some of the frustrations about the organization for which I work that I have already expressed, have made me seriously think about my future with the organization. I feel strongly that perhaps I have reached a turning point in my life. Is it a coincidence that this has happened at a time when I am about to embark on motherhood, another momentous time in my life? It could be that it is time I start pursuing another path that I have been considering for the past couple of years. Whatever may happen, I will make sure that I maintain a positive and proactive role in the changes that could take place in my life.

Great expectations lie ahead.