His ego is writing checks his body can’t cash

Had my mid-term career discussion today with my boss. He as much as told me I’m not going to get the Trainer III job he urged me to put in for. It was the old “you don’t have enough experience” thing again. Really? Do I have less experience now than when you told me I needed to put in for it? He also mentioned I needed to get my name out there and teach more than just basic classes, I needed to teach some of the specialty classes to get more exposure. I just stared at him since he does the class assignments, and he kind of realized he’d said something silly. I had put in for a Senior Manager job in the district I used to work in, and he said it didn’t bode well for my “brand” that after I had spent most of my career in that district they had to call him to ask if I was worth an interview (to which he allegedly said “yes” and told me to get prepped for one but it never happened). I gently reminded him that the of the two District Managers I had worked for one of them has retired and the other one has a different district now. The District HR manager that was there when I was now does the same job my boss does except in a training facility in Kentucky, and of the two facility managers in that town, one of them has retired and the other one died. It really isn’t a surprise to me that they had to ask, and I take it as a good sign for my “brand” that they bothered asking about me at all since none of them knew who the hell I was.

I told him about the jobs I’ve put in for in the other division, and he said he’s going to make some calls and see if I can get some job shadow experience since the person who does that job in our “real world” facility is not the ideal person to shadow. He again pointed out that I don’t do anything in our “real world” facility to get my name out there. I just stared at him again. It’s seriously not my job to run their store for them. And it’s not like they don’t know the right way to do things, they have all been trained, by us. They have all been re-trained, by us. There have been high-performing managers from stores that do it right transferred into our “real world” facility to fix it and they have been dragged down to the lowest common denominator. The management team in that facility are doing things their own way on purpose and in full knowledge of the fact they are not on program, but nothing is done about it. I am so annoyed.