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I am honestly unable to focus until things are quiet which is either before 9:30 or after 6… which is killing my productivity and speed completely- not to mention too many hours to count. Would love some tips too
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Any thoughts or suggestions?
Are these verbal demands or is there an email outlining the specifics and changes? I would take notes and also print out the email to said changes to ensure clarity and as a reminder for reference.
Ahhh yes. Cross-functional demands. That’s corporate speak to me, as we have it in my corp as well. I’ve been fortunate enough to have an amazing manager who will go to bat if her team is being asked to do work outside of our day to day workload.
She’s a firecracker and although it took some work on my end to ‘iron out’ our rocky start (she’s my 3rd manager in 4 years), I have learned to harness the energy she brings.
Anytime I am being asked to do something outside my functional area, I do a quick assessment of the time commitment. Do I have the bandwidth to complete the ask? My manager wants us adding her to ALL ‘outside asks’. That would get too tedious, in my situation.
I have 16 years experience over several functional areas, so I am often a ‘go to’. I want to keep certain connections strong, so small asks that require little effort I will generally complete.
Some asks, as you mentioned are actually demands. Those are generally quite time consuming and I will chat with my manager on the plus vs negatives. Time commitment to assess bandwidth constraints is a huge part of our chat.
If your company is like mine, we are in a bit of a downturn and ‘doing more with less’ is standard practice. We have had so many reorganizations, headcount cuts, forced retirements. That means we are losing more and more experienced employees, most teams are overly burdened by it.
If you do have a manager that will go to bat for you, I highly recommend chatting with them. At first it was difficult for me to say ‘I’m drowning a bit with current workload and outside demands, can you please help me prioritize.” I’ve been a ‘head down, push through, all work done no matter the time investment’ employee for most of my career.
I can tell you from experience that led me directly to burnout. You mentioned shifting priorities and that is one of the biggest struggles I had to overcome. My job is supposed to be more strategic, however shifting priorities is much more tactical. That’s a huge shift to overcome midday for example. Again- I became comfortable giving my manager a high level ask to help me align priorities.
Can you share a little more information in regards to your management structure? If you aren’t able to align with your direct manager, are you able to speak with a skip level manager? I know a few of my teammates who still struggle with our current managers ‘bull dog’ style, have addressed our skip level manager when our manager was on vacation and that was their ‘only option’. Otherwise, it’s strongly frowned upon to go to a skip level manager.