The past week and a half or so have been eventful. There’s been an office move planned for a while. Our desks are moving about 100 feet south. We’re mostly just rearranging people and teams on the same floor. It seems silly to me.
We have three new people starting soon, so on Wednesday a team split was announced. Normally I expect these things to be announced at a team meeting, but this time around it was announced in a series of one-on-one meetings. For mine, my second-level manager was there, too. I think that was because they included a performance review aspect in mine, which I was not prepared for.
I got a “Development Needed” rating for Leadership in my last performance review. I didn’t really understand why. I couldn’t imagine that I had actually gotten worse at leadership principles. A lot of the feedback was from the previous review period, too, which was extra frustrating. I definitely did one thing that was incredibly unprofessional and honestly downright shameful. I bad-mouthed someone I had known to the team that was hiring them. It was awful.
Anyway, apparently I’m on a trajectory toward another one, and I still don’t really understand why. They mentioned a meeting that happened half a year ago, which I didn’t really remember, so it wasn’t particularly helpful. They also mentioned a project, but I’m not clear on what they expected from me and how I fell short. I plan to meet with somebody I have a relationship with and trust in order to vent a little and try to understand what I can do about it. I think part of it is that the culture has been changing, and I haven’t been keeping up. I also don’t like the way the culture is changing.
They mentioned that I get great feedback from my teammates, but the feedback I get from outside the team is not so good. I figure that if the people who know me best and work with me the most like me, then I just need to build relationships with more people. Then they’ll know me better, and hopefully like me better or at least understand me better.
This past week was the Triratna Buddhist Community’s International Urban Retreat. It was really great to meditate twice each day, to have Dan & Nancy meditate with me in the mornings, and to go to the center each evening. It was also exhausting, especially given the long drives in traffic and Elise being sick. While Elise was sick, I mostly stayed home so I could keep her from licking her wounds without her having to wear a cone of shame all the time, but I also needed to be in the office for something each day, so my days were really chopped up. Early on, she was really uncomfortable, so she moved around a lot at night, and the cone made all sorts of racket when she ran into things. Her leg is looking much better, and she seems pretty happy lately.
It’s been eventful. This weekend I’m finally getting some time and mostly just cooking while movies played. Tomorrow, we wrap up the urban retreat, and Monday I’ll go to work and unpack my desk in the new location. I figure Tuesday I can probably bring the dogs in again. I’m excited to get back to normal, or at least a hundred feet south of normal.