About two years and 16 re-orgs ago, I was moved into a group
called Customer Success Operations, reporting to a woman I’ll call Natasha The
focus is completely tactical and she is definitely in her element; she’s all about
the detail and she does not have long-range vision.
I won’t go into the tall weeds of the goals of Customer Success
overall, except to note that there’s only one: renewals. Natasha is nose-down
in those weeds operationally, though—process, tools, procedures. What I do—product
management, right now focused on customer feedback—does not directly
advance the retention of customers, so it’s deemed as no value to the org and
to Natasha.
This is why I got the chop.
(As an aside, it’s interesting that all the various stakeholders
of customer feedback gush about how great the information I report is, but no
one is willing to fund it; i.e., allocate
a staff slot to it. It’s been my observation
that people will pay for what they value. Therefore I conclude that people in my
company do not value what I’m doing. Therefore I am without value. Which is to
say, worthless.)
Let me give you a few facts about Natasha as a manager. She
holds weekly one-on-one meetings with her direct reports. I have not had one with
her since last August.
She has never had a discussion with me about my career goals.
This is because to think “career” implies that you might want at some point to
be doing something except serving her team needs. The one time I brought up
needing time to meet with a mentor on a weekly basis, she became palpably
upset. “Is this something the program requires or just something you’ve set for
yourself?”
One day last June, the pain in my knee was so bad, I IMed her
about it, saying I was clocking out. Her response was, “Oh, hope you feel
better for sure.” Never a follow-up inquiry.
When I logged sick days for my surgery in January, I noted them
as being for surgery and recovery. She approved them; never inquired about the
reason.
At one of the weekly “team” meetings, she and the two other
direct reports were chatting enthusiastically about her being on PTO the next
few days. After some minutes of this, she finally said, “Oh, [Bas Bleu], you
may not know that I’m going to Cuba.”
Well, no, I wouldn’t—that might be the kind of thing that would
come up in a one-to-one, which we have not had since August.
When I got the fixed-term offer in September, I had one exchange
(via chat) with her, before going to the VP of Customer Success, her manager.
Since that time, she has not once reached out to me to ask how I’m doing or how
she might help.
Until last week, when she IMed me to say that the acquisition
transition IT team informed her that I can’t participate in a particular
program because my contract ends in May. And here’s exactly what she said:
“can we sync up today or tomorrow, I know you’ve been chatting
with [VP]
“but would love to hear about what’s happening with the job
search
“I’ll send an invite”
Six fucking months and now she’d love to hear about my
job search. I was deeply concerned that I would not be able to keep a civil tongue
in my head for that conversation. However, it’s not like my family didn’t put
the dys in functional, so in the end I just kept silent except to answer her
questions.
The call lasted 18 minutes, about half of it spent with her
using the internal jobs site to conduct searches so she could give me pointers
on how to search. “Try using quotation marks.” That’s her idea of managerial
support.
She sent a blizzard of links to jobs she’d found that had only
ancillary relevance to my skills because she has never once asked about my
skills in the two years I’ve reported to her. My computer audibly pings every
time I get an IM, so I had to just leave the house for a while until she got
sidetracked in the tall weeds.
Well, you may be wondering what this narrative might have to do
with gratitude. So, here it is:
Whatever happens, three weeks from now I will not be reporting
to Natasha, and I am deeply grateful for that.
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