So a month into my new job I’m finding myself in a bit of a malaise. I feel I’m making good contributions in meetings, emails etc and can bring my experience to a lot of areas, getting stuck in to various conversations etc but I’m lacking a bit of focus for my desk time and struggling to actually produce tangible outputs. I’m naturally a detail person but I’ve mostly been operating on a more strategic and/or leadership level in recent years, and now I’m faced with needing to build out the detail on stuff myself without much direction. I’m getting easily distracted by things I come across not directly in my remit where I think I can add value, looking at things a bit more holistically whereas actually I’m going to be on the hook for some lower-level stuff that I’m struggling to progress. I wouldn’t say it’s “imposter syndrome” as I know I have the aptitude required, but I feel like sooner or later someone is going to say “OK HangTime you talk a good game, but where’s the outputs we need from you?!?”. I look at what I’ve physically produced in a month and its quite pathetic, really, albeit a fair chunk of time was taken for onboarding, relationship building etc.
This is partly procrastination on my part and partly a lack of direction – my boss is in another continent; the programme structures are very vague (my role spans multiple) and I don’t currently have a team around me although that should be coming soon. I’ve never really been faced with this situation before, I’ve either been out of the weeds or if I’m in the weeds I’ve had a much more specific set of goals to work towards, team members that need things from me etc, providing a natural structure to what I do each day. I’m in the office two days a week which to be honest is largely a waste of time aside from the random odd conversation with stakeholders that wouldn’t otherwise occur, and this org is much less mature than some places when it comes to use of chat software, it’s nearly all peer-to-peer rather than large channels so I’m out of the loop on some stuff. On a positive note people seem pretty good to work with, relatively easy going etc.
There’s a backdrop of unease too in that this organisation whilst definitely well intentioned seems to have lots of groups of people rushing around doing related stuff with an expectation it is all going to hang together but without the sort of governance I’ve typically experienced in large orgs. To use an analogy it’s like one set of people are building a railway track and another set of people are building a train with the intention of ultimately operating a railway line, but nobody is checking if the gauge matches. It doesn’t help that there’s numerous vendors involved on different SoWs, ambiguity on who should take decisions and a general mishmash of projects touching on the same things. I feel like we are at risk of spinning tyres and also end up cutting a lot of corners to demonstrate progress, hence compromising the original strategy. What I haven’t yet determined is whether this is the elephant in the room that everyone knows but not many are talking about, or if it’s simply because I’m new and don’t have visibility of all the machinations behind the scenes yet.
Writing this out has helped me self-reflect & conclude I probably need to just come back from holiday and roll my sleeves up, focus on my deliverables and let the big picture stuff naturally fall into place rather than worrying too much about it. It's definitely not the case that I dislike the org or job, more that I'm struggling to adapt to a different way of working.
considering they are moving to an more international business model and I bring so much technical skills of nearly 2 decades with current technologies. Which they are struggling to find with anyone here.
