I genuinely have nowhere to vent except to my staff and it doesn't feel right; so here I am.
In the past year, our department's management changed, and it's been a real rollercoaster. Now, I report to four different managers from entirely different departments, each with their own set of tasks or rules.
On top of that, they want me to supervise a different department on weekends while managing my own department, all because they 'trust me' due to my experience and work history. But the job description keeps shifting (and it's not even in writing despite my numerous requests), and fair pay for my team and me? Well, that's a never-ending issue. Frustrating, to say the least.
I keep running into a wall when I try to escalate issues through the reporting chain. It's always “Not my department” or “Not my problem,” and it's getting old. I feel like I'm playing the role of an unofficial, underpaid assistant manager with a clown nose on. Who do I report to? What's my actual job? What am I responsible for, or more importantly, not responsible for? I just want to focus on my unique role, but they keep relying on me and my team to plug the gaps left by everyone else's shortcomings. My team doesn't see a penny extra from all their hard work, but bonuses keep being dolled out to staff who consistently cause us as a company to lose revenue.
The standards are ridiculously high, and if we don't exceed them, I get harshly reprimanded on behalf of my staff (Which I am not complaining about, I'd rather them come to me than bother my staff with petty stuff). It's baffling that people making 2-3 times what I make can't even fill out a simple work order form, yet I'm the one in the hot seat when I don't know what happened on a day I wasn't even working. It's beyond exhausting.
When I tell you that this company would drastically fail and be financially crippled within months if me and my counter-part left abruptly, I am not blowing smoke up my own ass. We are the only ones trained on these proprietary systems, we are the ones who have written the SOPs and trained accordingly, we are the ones picking up the slack.