This is more of a rant than anything so apologies in advance – I am just so beyond tired of egocentric management, arse kissing and yes men.
I’m an ex-business support analyst. My previous position involved a lot of collaboration, cross-team support and problem solving. I was in charge of identifying and fixing problems that arose within the day-to-day management of the business. Was the sales team struggling to remember to send follow-up emails? I would find a way to automate it within our CRM custom to the team’s needs. Sadly, I was laid off (budget cuts, around 30 other people were also let go) from my last job and decided to try out a career move in the aftermath which has led to my current predicament.
I’ve moved from a relatively autonomous, trusted position in a tech-forward collaborative environment to a minimum wage entry-level position with a hierarchy straight out of the 80s. I’m currently a sales administrator at a travel business – essentially the step before becoming an actual travel exec for someone with minimal industry experience and too old for an apprenticeship.
The reality of the job is making constant outbound calls to website quote requests and nothing else but I’m okay to suck eggs and eat humble pie for a few months until I can secure the actual job I want.
We’ve been having issues over the past few months with admins losing track of important dates (blackout dates, sales freezes, etc.) and making mistakes on quotes and bookings as a result. These dates are often shared weeks/months in advance and by the time they’re relevant, the team has forgotten. A fix is no big deal, right? Right?
We just got Slack and my immediate supervisor seems befuddled at best by the system whereas I’m very well versed in slack. I spent less than two minutes creating a dummy calendar in Excel, integrated it into a private channel to test everything was running smoothly and invited my supervisor to the chat so I could show them a working example of my idea. I suggested we do something similar in our team chat so that everyone has quick access to an overview of key dates using my document as an example.
His reaction? Not great.
I got dragged over the coals for ‘wasting time’ and ‘not doing my work’. There were loaded suggestions that I ‘must be slacking off’ if I had time to ‘mess around in our messenger app’. Apparently, I’m not supposed to bring improvement suggestions to their attention as it's ‘not my job’. I’ve also gotten snide comments about focusing on my own area of work from them for highlighting grammatical errors and typos in our email templates.
I interviewed with this person’s boss and I’m pretty sure they have no idea about my background as they’ve made no attempts to get to know me in the three months I’ve been here.
All they see is another lowly grunt to push around who’s to be seen and not heard in any capacity beyond a never-ending stream of outbound call requests.
I just cannot understand how someone’s ego can be so fragile that they ignore a valid improvement suggestion that is being offered up to them on a plate by a team member purely because they view them as below them. It sickens me.
I have half a mind to email them a copy of my CV and LinkedIn commendations for organisational problem solving.
I'm debating whether or not to show up to my next shift on Wednesday.