part of the picture, 1/2 of the story

My work has gone through some interesting changes in the past year. Last year when I started, there were 18 employees in my department under 1 supervisor (who is still my current boss, but we’ll get to that). Now this woman is very intelligent and super-good at her job. However, she has her hand in so many things that her supervisory status was very neglected. Everyone got good reviews – regardless of performance and ability to think. No one paid attention to the mistakes individuals made, how a lot of people were too overburdened and yet others had nothing to keep them busy. We wasted tons of money, tons of resources, and training was neglected. It was chaotic in that, while you knew what accounts/area of sales everyone handled, you really didn’t know what it encompassed, much less how to cover for them if they went on vacation or called in sick.

Fast forward 6 months to this past January. They promoted my supervisor to Manager and promoted another woman to be supervisor under the manager. Finally! Someone who won’t be in meetings or in her office all day and unaware of all the crap some of the employees get away with! (For example, multiple 15-minute personal phone calls during the day, instead of a 10-minute smoke break, a 30-minute break, fudging of responsibility, etc.)

One month later, we started a major overhaul of how our system works and how we process orders. A couple of people quit, some were fired, and soon we were down to 10 employees! We started tracking productivity, documenting processes. People got really mad when they were written up for lying, falsifying paperwork, and, honestly, being beyond “rude” to the point it was shocking. (Note to self: do not scream to your boss that she is lying and making threats against you in front of the the VP of HR!)

But then with the changes came more changes. Our supervisor was transferred to another department for various reasons. So, now we have a manager, and now 8 employees. What to do?

I know! Let’s promote 2 of the employees to “Leads” (aka – not supervisor). They’ll do a lot of supervisor stuff, but they won’t be salaried and they won’t be allowed to write people up or have access to personnel files. AKA – do the manager’s dirty work but not get to follow through with it.

And that’s my job. I get to document all the reasons why people should be written up. I get to make sure rules and processes are followed, but I can’t do anything about it if they don’t listen to me. I have to elevate everything to my boss, the manager, who says, “Good. Thanks for bringing that to my attention.” And it never gets farther than that. No one is written up, no one is spoken to, no documentation of wrong-doing.

Great.

So I’m one Lead, and thankfully the other Lead is the other intelligent person who can think — and a good friend. (Sorry, but the other 6 in my department just aren’t that… well, bright. They prefer being told exactly what to do without having to think about it. Its disgusting, actually). So I’m 1/2 the story – I have half the 6 people under me, and I’m responsible for half of the supervisory responsibility.

No offense to the other lead, but I got all the good stuff. I get to do all the “cool” reports that my manager used to run, but since I’m her primary back up, I get to run a lot of them and work on them. For all the new projects, I get to be involved… for important programming decisions, I can have a say.

I absolutely love it. Instead of processing orders and having accounts (well, I still have a few, but its not a huge load. Like 10% of what everyone else handles). Where was i? Oh, right. So instead of processing orders, etc., I spent most of today working on an excel spreadsheet that, when I roll it out on 10/12, will be my “project” that tracks our performance in all areas of sales for our top 20, eventually top 30 customers. I am designing and programming this spreadsheet! I’m so excited! See, there is where the extreme nerdiness of Norny comes out.

Today, I figured out how to do Nested IF formulas… and it was awesome. It looked kinda like this:
=IF(i19>0, (i19+i8+i3)/3, IF(i8>0, (i8+i3), IF(i8>0, i8, 0)))
Isn’t that just so cool? It works, too. Actually, there are some kinks with the data that this formula is looking at that I have to work out… but its one of the sweetest things I’ve learned to do and figured out pretty much on my own.

Its things like this which are the reason for why I love this job.