Pre-resolution processing

Before I think about what I want for the New Year I am need to process a little of what happened over the last year. I have been particularly thinking about the last year at work.

The last several months at work were very wearing on me physically, mentally and emotionally. The work was constant and intense.

While the complex demands of my position as program manager, including simultaneously managing multiple programs and several significant campaign accounts were naturally stressful and even tiring, I am writing about and processing through the last year because I believe much of the stress I suffered was self induced. This is difficult to come to terms with but I hope in doing so I will release some of the guilt I hold about my performance and free myself from some of the anxiety I hold heading into my new position.

Before I continue, let me say this is not intended to be a critique in any way of my team. My perceptions here are my own and I “own” that I could be mistaken in how I perceived their actions. This is, instead, an outline of what lead to the frustrating aspects of my position. In addition, I work with a wonderful team and for the most part really enjoyed managing the programs. I learned a lot, participated in many great activities and had much leeway in how the programs proceeded. I received lots of positive reinforcement for my performance, and, without the strong help I received from my coworkers I would have been unable to succeed.

So, onto the analysis of the stress…

My job required reliance on the rest of my team to provide me with information to complete projects and to help me facilitate trainings and workshops. I carried an attitude that because I wasn’t their supervisor I couldn’t demand or require their assistance and participation, that I could only ask (I think I was wrong in this perspective, I think I could have required their assistance, but that is a whole other story). If they didn’t provide the needed help I became stressed and frustrated. I realize now, that as I became more stressed and frustrated I unconsciously began to resent some of the projects I managed.

I am realizing now that I likely, unconsciously, demonstrated this frustration and resentment. And, I believe my teammates responded, unconsciously, to me by looking at my work as something they didn’t want to participate in. I mean, who could blame them, would you want to work on projects which the project manager himself saw as frustrations? I believe this lead to my team mates further limiting/delaying their responses to my requests for assistance. The more this occurred the more resentful I became. This resentment, I believe, was a contributing factor to the stress and fatigue I experienced over the last several months.

In addition, I believe I demonstrated an attitude of being busy and often times stressed. Already resenting that I was working very hard for little appreciation (perception) from my team I began to, again unconsciously, demonstrate my resentment when coworkers would come to my office for assistance. I saw their requests as distractions and annoyances. The more I demonstrated this attitude the less likely my teammates were to come to my office to ask for assistance and I began to feel isolated. It is strange because I actually enjoyed the moments when a coworker would sit in my office and we would discuss campaign strategies or even their personal frustrations. However, my initial reaction was to put up an internal wall when I felt others were infringing on my time.

On the upside the isolation provided me distraction free time to complete projects. On the downside I sometimes felt all alone in my work furthering my resentment of my projects. And, the isolation from the rest of the team only played further into the cycle I experienced.

Finally, I can see now how I often times avoided planning projects with enough advanced notice. This, as you may well guess, further contributed to my stress and frustration. I avoided beginning projects because I was resentful of the work I was doing. The lack of proper planning caused the projects to take more intense energy in a short amount of time, leading to fatigue and stress. As this continued to occur there was less time to plan properly for future projects. I found myself working against short deadlines. This of course played into my difficulties getting responses from my teammates as they were forced to respond to relatively short deadlines on many of my requests. It also caused my direct report stress as she often needed to complete projects with short deadlines. Feeling guilty for causing her stress I would take work on myself which, if I had planned enough in advance, I could have delegated.

Part of the problem was the notion of not wanting to stress out others. I would put lots of extra work into ensuring if I did request assistance from my teammates their fulfillment of the request would be easier. I would spend two hours prepping a spreadsheet so they would only need five minutes to fill in their information. While I took pride in this I became resentful if I perceived they didn’t appreciate the time and energy I invested. Of course, they had no way of knowing and I would take their lack of an on-time response as a reflection of their lack of appreciation. However, as noted above I didn’t always provide them adequate time to complete the projects.

Sigh…hindsight is 20/20.

I admit I wouldn’t be writing this post if I didn’t hold some insecurity around my past year at work. I wish I could go back and change some of my actions, wish I had done a better job. However, my coworkers and supervisors perceived me as having managed my programs very effectively, so, as I hinted above, I don’t think I failed in my work. I just think I could have at time done better.

And while I don’t really have a strong need to profess all my accomplishments, I think it might be helpful for my ego to reflect briefly on those things: I was a strong training facilitator (in fact I conducted over 200 hours of training this year alone!), I was able to connect the overarching strategies and messages through all the programs, I designed trainings which were interactive and customer focused, I worked hard to make requests for my teammates easier for them to complete, I co-created and co-facilitated one of the strongest Loaned Executive training courses in several years, successfully supervised and fostered a strong rapport with my direct report, and continued, during the campaign season, to receive high marks for my customer relationships. There, that felt nice…smile…

Also, and this feels good to know, my move into my new position, which begins in January, came about because my new supervisor and her supervisor wanted me in the position. It was their idea, not mine, for me to move into this role in major gift fundraising. I am always looking for evidence of approval – well, there I have it!

While this post might seem like I am heaping a lot of blame on myself, it really is just an opportunity for me to analyze how I operated in the most significant position I have held in my professional life This analysis will help me identify similar patterns in the future and therefore hopefully allow me to avoid stress. By acknowledging the stress I experienced in my position and my role in creating the stress, I am also able to “put it in the past” and move on…see it, acknowledge it, learn from it, move on.

The good and the bad, its what life is all about. I know in my new position, and in every aspect of my life, I will behave in effective and ineffective ways, both for my personal success and happiness and for the success and happiness of others. Thanks to what I have laid out here I have a stronger self awareness of patterns in my professional life which lead to stress. Hopefully I can use this self awareness in the future.

Now, I am ready for some resolutions!