Re-org

The first workday after a long holiday is enough to bring anyone down. You spend some time sifting through your inbox trying to figure out what you do for a living. Each work-related fact you bring to mind kills a small portion of your holiday memory.

By 10am, any holiday afterglow is well and truly dead.

I'm counting the minutes until lunchtime when it happens.

An unannounced meeting for the entire project team. For this afternoon. From the PM.

F$*k

Team meetings with little or no lead time are bad. Really bad.

I do a quick mental inventory of the corporate rumor mill. The only likely candidate I can come up with is aimed at the PM. There's a re-org and a sizable group of managers will have to re-apply for their jobs. The fun part? After the re-org the number of positions to apply for is considerably smaller. The PM will compete to keep a job they've had for years.

And they do a great job. Management is service, and good managers serve their staff as well as keep tabs on it. The PM has been the kind of manager who is out in front knocking down obstacles so their staff can focus on getting work done. On multiple occasions, CorpWorld's culture of "it's-stupid-but-we've-always-done-it-this-way" has collided violently with the PM. Plenty of managers would have given in, but ours stood up, took the lumps and - odds and precedent be damned - made things change.

Which is why my mind is fixated on this particular possibility.

I'm reading a book by Barbara Tuchman, where she makes the excellent point that negative events are disproportionately represented in history and news. Good things are surely celebrated, but are not marked in collective memory the way bad things are.

I want to believe in good things. But the fact remains: You do not hold an impromptu meeting to announce the status quo will continue.

Something has changed.

The team files in and we arrange ourselves for what we collectively know will be a brief announcement. A chair is arranged for the PM at the head of the room, but I cannot imagine them using it.

The PM arrives and they chose to stand. They are leaving the project and the company. They have elected to not compete for their current position and that will mean a swift end to their tenure at CorpWorld. They do their best to put a good face on it but it is clear that they are at odds with the current culture shift in the company.

They make nice, because they are nice - but it's clear that this is a brutal event. We voice our encouragement and sincere thanks, but there's not a lot you can offer a person who has just opted into a corporate death. They are smart, experienced and good at what they do - surely some company will realize this.

Because this place obviously didn't.