One of my former managers made an incorrect assumption of my approach to work. I had no agenda or plan to change his perspective, and it took about 2 years for him to come to greater understanding of who I am and my role. Credit to him that since then he thought it was a good thing to protect my role in the event of restructuring. To protect my role, his idea was to better define the job specification, and to develop my skills. I had no particular inclination of not going with it, or vehemently refuse to go with it.
My thought was that the unknown future is really unknown. What is perceived to be “rooms for improvement” is not the matter in restructuring – well, it could help, but the options are vast, and the chances of getting correct options is slim. To think and work these options through would be full-time job for me.
In hindsight, that did not result in a positive outcome: I must quantify that by saying when restructuring did come, the attempts in the “improvement” did not have any impact on my getting a good / better deal in the restructuring. There will be situations when the attempted improvements would have helped. I don’t dispute that.
Not that time had gone on, I often reflect the period when he was my manager that he often took every opportunity to support me to improve; and the context to do so had to be from a “negative” or “falling short” standpoint. As a minority, I have no problem feeling inadequate and off the mark. To identify shortcomings and want to improve, that is not my problem. The issue for me is that we spent wrong energy or the wrong thing.
