The best-laid plans of mice and men sometimes go astray. When I posted the first time about my new job, it was after a pretty extensive internal process for me personally — reflecting extensively on what I had liked about previous jobs, what I was looking for in a new job — and a formal job search across multiple areas.
As I finished that search and said yes to the dress, so to speak, I went with a stakeholder relations job for disability pensions. I liked the way it was framed, there was a formal set of mechanisms in place, not building SR from the ground up, and there was a Round Table that met three times a year that would drive the work cycle.
The interview with the DG had been great, I was excited about the files, and I had touched on things that were important to me in the job search…a chance to innovate, an open management environment, good people to work with, and a solid working relationship with my management team.
On the last two points, he noted two issues that I would face in taking the job. First, there were what we would come to refer to as legacy HR issues in the team. Second, we didn’t know who the director would be as the position was empty, and he was in the process of looking for someone (there were competitions, etc., already underway). We talked about my own career aspirations and I confirmed I wasn’t looking for a promotion — I like my level, and while I’m willing to act when needed, I wasn’t looking to bump up anytime soon, if ever — so this wasn’t a “stepping stone” to something else.
I took the job
Things didn’t go quite as smoothly as I had hoped.
I’m going to start with the environment. I didn’t know anyone in the area before I started so it was hard to do much of a reference check on what it was like working there. The initial environment was borderline toxic in some ways. The directorate was undergoing a change in philosophy, albeit perhaps a needed one, and many of the long-serving members were not happy with the new direction. A reorganization had been pre-announced, i.e. “something was coming”, but for a variety of factors, the file wasn’t moving, and the staff felt they were in limbo for too long. Disengagement, resentment, even open negativity from some members. While I could reassure my team that our work direction was generally the same and that we wouldn’t see much change in our files, I was also an acting director with another team where it was going downhill. From their perspective, it felt like they had poured their life into a file only to be now told their contributions and approaches were no longer what was needed. There were also legacy HR issues. Grievances, misaligned file responsibilities, people having shifted files every six months, little stability or ownership of their own files, fear of innovation in some cases, and fear in general of what was coming.
But you know what? The issues I was seeing were not insurmountable. I’ve worked through them before, I have ways to counteract and mitigate those influences, and I knew the structural re-org was coming which would give us a great “turning point” moment to build around.
Regardless, though, put bluntly, it was not the happiest place on earth.
When it came to the management culture, the openness I sought seemed almost non-existent. The DG seemed to be saying all the right words, but generally speaking, people hardly spoke up at the meetings, and few if anyone volunteered anything beyond what we were already doing. I’m a pretty candid manager, and equally so when I’m acting director. I do NOT need for my view to win the day, but I will make sure the view is heard, and preferably in an environment where it is welcome. I also like to believe, somewhat naively, that you can create that atmosphere from below, it doesn’t have to be driven by the chair. But it wasn’t happening.
On the innovation front, I probably should have poked harder on this one in the interview. One of my strengths at Foreign Affairs, CIDA including the DM’s office, and during my time managing the planning files previously, was the ability to streamline some of the processes, to take out the brain farts and nice-to-haves and focus on getting the job done with as informal of processes as the situations allowed. There were a bunch of pedestrian examples in my time in the job, but I kept hearing the same phrase: “Just do it the same way as last time.” Sorry, that’s not a rallying cry for me when I see things that can be improved within my span of control.
On the file side, I actually liked the stakeholder files I was managing. A good round table with some potential to improve for the future, a chance to expand another two files, and to potentially grow a fourth. I had ideas, people on the team had ideas, we had some options. I wasn’t sure how fast we could get to them with some legacy plus new HR issues, but it would work itself out in time as we got the rhythm going. Or so I thought.
The final challenge was the who factor. As I mentioned above, I didn’t know the team when I started, but I got to know them and work with them, and I was upbeat for the future. I could see some ways to work with them, and I did my normal mentoring / coaching option on HR and competitive processes. Lots of candid conversations. A good basis for the future, I hoped.
Two other managers left, and I was disappointed to lose them. But with the reorg, I would get to work with a third who looked like a good partner to work with in the management realm. Call that one a draw.
The challenge in the end was the director position. As I mentioned above, the DG noted that I would be taking the job blind, since he didn’t know who the director would be. I said I wasn’t too worried about it, since in a mitigation consideration of worst-case possibilities, I had worked for some difficult people in the past and found a way to make it work.
As we got closer to the reorg announcement, there was another director position that was being eliminated and replaced at the manager level, so we would have an “extra” director and an “empty” director box. The math was easy to do for everyone in the Directorate, but when I asked the DG about it, he said no, that wasn’t the plan. Even eight days before the announcement, he reconfirmed that wasn’t the plan. Reconfirmed again a couple of days before. And then announced it was her. Maybe there’s a story in there somewhere, one I didn’t need to know or care about, but it wasn’t a very open management process. Whatever, we keep rolling, cuz that’s the job.
The new director and I never found our rhythm. We both tried, we both failed. In the end, it was clear that neither our management approaches nor communication styles mesh well.
For communications, I tried an early visioning approach, then a work planning approach, followed up with a table of contents for a policy piece, and finally started just giving her the pieces to react to at the end. None of them were what she wanted, but we couldn’t seem to agree on “what” she did want. After a particularly chaotic interchange, she sent me a strongly worded email about something not being what she wanted. Unfortunately, I found the tone completely unacceptable, and so much so that I obsessed about it all weekend. Way beyond the norm. We had a “come to Jesus” conversation on the Monday to discuss it, all very cordial and frank, and the atmosphere improved, but the comms side did not. We were both trying, but it wasn’t working. Four months in and we hadn’t found a solution.
But for me, the problem wasn’t just the miscommunication. I wasn’t comfortable with the environment or the tone either. I reached out to our Employee Assistance Program to talk through my reactions, because I couldn’t quite figure out why I had reacted so strongly. I felt anger, apathy, frustration, sure, but that wouldn’t normally be sufficient to cause me to obsess. The harshness of the feedback I was getting, combined with the organizational uncertainty and some stress, and the frustration that I wasn’t able to solve this conundrum on my own, was producing a different emotion in me. Fear.
Fear that I couldn’t fix it. Fear that the challenges were outside of my control. Fear that I was in the hands of someone else, someone who I didn’t communicate well with, and perhaps I was also fearful that I was out of practice for managing upward since I had been in a “flying solo” role for so long with people who loved my work that it had been a while since I had to sell someone on my approach or my abilities. The EAP counsellor’s advice was crystal clear — find a new job immediately. I wasn’t quite so convinced. Move on, most definitely if we couldn’t work through it, but immediately? I had some files to deliver on before that point. I figured I would work through it, maybe look for something come the summer or fall.
But then, as our comms issues became more evident, our management styles started to clash as well. Questions of accountability and even procedural fairness in our dealing with staff were starting to unravel as we got closer to some deadlines. And while I was considering the ramifications of one of them for my timeline (it was a big enough dealbreaker to accelerate my departure), the decision was accelerated for me — my boss asked me if I was the right fit for my job (I am, but I’m definitely not the right fit with her). Once your boss asks you that, there’s no saving the relationship. You just leave. So I did.
Starting my job search
Since I had drastically under-estimated the “who” factor in my previous job search, I started my job search looking almost exclusively at the people with whom I would be working. I aimed for one group in particular, and added another as I went. The first was to reach out to a DG who had offered me something the year before. I worked for him previously for four years and found him downright awesome. Since last year, he has filled out his management team with two EXs that I like and respect, and for the job in question, another co-manager with whom I’ve worked well in the past. Four bodies in the management hierarchy that I’ve worked with in the past, and it’s all positive. A pretty rich target to acquire, if something worked out.
Then, the overall Budget came down, and there was a small announcement that Treasury Board would be leading a “horizontal skills review” of government programming. It wasn’t clear initially what that would look like, but the day after the Budget, I emailed two DGs most likely to know anything about it to see if there was any sort of team being put together, who would lead internally, etc. One responded with some info, I stopped by his office to chat later that day, and got the low-down. It looked like it might be all done at TBS, but we’d see. I reached out to someone at TBS to find out some info on that side, and got some basic info and some referrals.
Fast-forward another week, and it looked like something would click with the first DG. Except then the details for the skills review were decided upon, and the DG I had chatted with informally was now the Departmental lead for it. And he would need a small team. With my name on his list of likely people. I don’t want to simply brag that I finagled that in advance by being proactive (true!), because I want to equally brag that I was a no-brainer for someone to suggest anyway (equally true!). 🙂
Based on my earlier work on similar corporate exercises, and my 9 years doing corporate stuff in the same Branch, there are only about five people with the branch-related background to do it, another five in the Department who would show up in a broader search, and maybe another 15 who would pop up in an open casting call. Call it 25 people across the department with a combination of skills, knowledge and previous experience. In my case, I have all three. Three other DGs told me when they heard the news, “Well, that makes perfect sense, it’s like the job is tailor-made for you.” And it’s one of the options I was looking for a year ago, but the timing was off by a year.
Now comes the bad part — the skills review would be a short duration project, maybe up to a year, but likely six months. No permanent job, just an assignment maybe. But I knew I wanted out of my current situation and into a permanent home. The DG with the great management team was offering me that permanent home, so I had two great options. One temporary, one permanent.
And so I did what no one should do in these situations. I tried to have my cake and eat it too. Or an extra sundae.
And it worked. My permanent home is set, they’re finalizing paperwork, and I’m moving to the division with the great management team. Like a sundae with ice cream (good files) and whipped cream (good managers).
Then the chocolate sauce was added that I asked about — they’re going to LOAN me to the skills review team for the project. Ka-ching! I get to do both!
Or as my wife pointed out, “It’s pretty impressive that you’re getting everything you asked for.”
Some pointed out I was getting Karmic rewards, but I don’t think that’s true. First, I don’t believe that is the way Karma works; second, the situation I was in wasn’t “bad”. The people weren’t horrible, no good, very bad people. We just had completely different communication and management styles. It happens. And with seven years to go to retirement, I’m not willing to stick around to try and work through that angst. Nor, apparently, was my now-previous boss.
I much prefer to have an ice cream sundae with whipping cream and chocolate drizzle. There may even be a chance at a cherry on top, but maybe I’ve pushed enough for one week.
Back in April, I blogged about Starting the Official Job Search of 2017 and I added it to the list of “50 things to do before I’m 50” i.e. find and start a new job. I mentioned at the time I started my search that I have been in my current “box” for the last nine years, and while the job changed a bit in there — six years of performance measurement plus special projects and three years of planning — it has been a similar job for most of that time. I thought about leaving before, and I’ve had offers, but either the timing wasn’t right or it wasn’t the right job. And, as I like to be brutally honest on my blog, one of the main reasons I didn’t leave was that I was comfortable.
I had good files that I liked and that I’m good at too, I had a good team, work/life balance was near perfect, and I had bosses that trusted me and gave me autonomy and room to work within my sphere. What was there not to love?
In a word? Variety.
I have a very high threshold/capacity for corporate work. I actually like it most of the time, when most people run the other way. And managing corporate planning files lets you dip your toes into a lot of pools. Public engagement through reporting, ties to policy priorities, budgeting and operational priorities, high-level management and low-level operations, audits, evaluations, risk, business planning. Lots of things that other people hate and that I quite enjoy, if enjoy is the right word. But the planning cycle is, indeed, a cycle which means that it repeats. And while it is a bit or a lot different each year, it is variations on a theme, not true variety per se. And I didn’t realize how much I needed a change until back in April when I started the official search.
Now before I tell you where I went, or even how I got to the decision, I have to confess something. I completely screwed up. Out of arrogance, mainly. But I could have really screwed my career doing what I did, I just happened to luck out near the end.
Here’s the thing. I’m a manager, and I’m not looking for promotion. That means just deployment at level. And I’m a good manager. Separate from my opinion, I entered my job search with three 5.0/5.0 ratings in a row for my formal performance, and nothing less than a 4.0/5.0 since the formal numbers started. I have had job offers with acting promotions, I have been recruited by people in the know who believe I’m good, and my own employees give me higher than average feedback as a manager, usually markedly higher in 90% of the categories. And, even without that, I’ve had other managers seek me out for advice on management issues because they’ve heard from employees i.e. word of mouth that I’m a really good manager. So my employees told other employees who told other employees who told their managers, and their managers have said, “Hey, I was curious if you have time to go for a coffee to talk about something I’m dealing with.” Even if I wasn’t naturally arrogant, I have external evidence to suggest that I’m good. This is not to say I’m not a Grade A whack-a-doodle on a regular basis, but overall, I’m good at my job.
So I went into the job search with high expectations. Which turned out to be way too high. Unreasonably so, apparently.
When I did my last full open-ended job search, it was almost ten years ago and I had nowhere near the experience I have now. I searched pointedly for two weeks and had five offers. One was okay, two were good, and two were great. But five offers. And my network is better now.
My first tactical errorwas in assuming that I would have similar opportunities now, and thus I was quite comfortable telling my boss to go ahead and find my replacement, even though I hadn’t found a job yet. Just because of the environment, and a lack of immediate succession planning for my position in a narrow niche for the type of job (planning is common, but reporting directly to a DG and flying solo as a manager is not), I agreed that I would do overlap with my replacement. This meant that I would leave after they started, and working backwards, we would likely need to find them before I found a new position.
That is NOT the way most people manage their careers, and as per my experience, with good reason.
I also had a small glitch…my french was expired, which means I needed to renew my written and oral before moving on. Written was no trouble, and I was confident with my oral, but there were no guarantees. Plus I got messed around with on my scheduling, and I missed my level on my first try. But the big issue for job searching was that I didn’t want to have conversations too early with my potential targets.
I didn’t want to meet with Jane Manager and say, “Hey, do you have any jobs available?” and have them say, “Here’s one, can you start in two weeks?” because I couldn’t. I not only had to fix my french, but I also had to train my replacement. So I approached a couple of mentors and said, “How do I handle this?”.
Their advice was that as long as I said that I was looking for late Spring, early Summer (i.e. end of June), it would be very clear I wasn’t looking for “now”. So I started my search.
And I perhaps made a second tactical error. Many of my larger network contacts have moved up in the world. Ones that were formerly Directors and Director Generals have now become DGs and ADMs. Of my first eight meetings, I targeted three directors, four DGs, and an ADM. I expected by the time I finished those eight meetings, I would have about 4 offers. I had 0. Add in the next four, and I had approximately 1 real offer, 1 soft offer, and 1 soft interest. But here’s part of the potential tactical issue…DGs and ADMs don’t hire EC-07 managers; managers report to directors. So perhaps some of the people I was talking to weren’t exactly the right level to give me an offer per se so much as information.
Which is partly why I am not sure it is exactly an error. It was more an error of expectation, even though I wasn’t actually asking them for offers. I was in a very formal “environmental scanning” mode, and I was looking for a very specific type of job. In earlier posts, I mentioned that I really like projects. So I wasn’t exactly looking for “here’s an established job for day-to-day duties”, I wanted a large initiative or project. Equally, I wasn’t looking for just any project…I didn’t want to be spinning my wheels or pushing string, it had to be something that was recognized as needing to be done, preferably something that was broken and needed to be fixed, and which people in command actually wanted to be fixed. If that sounds too abstract, let me be precise. I believe our user/security policy in the department is incredibly dysfunctional and broken, and greatly in need of modernization, reorientation, and well, replacement. With my experience with privacy, risk, policy, corporate, IT, etc., I’d even have a pretty good set of skills to bring to the project. And there are lots of people around the department who agree with me on the need. Except for two very important people who like it as is — the Deputy Minister and the DG in charge. There is no desire or traction to make changes. So working on it would be completely like pushing string.
So I was looking for a pretty unique type of job — manager position not executive, problem to be solved, likely corporate, recognized to be fixed, and a desire to fix it. Kind of my dream scenario in some respects. With one extra obvious wrinkle. The position has to be open or about to be open. Of course, if a DG or ADM has a problem to be fixed and there is buy-in to fix it, they probably have already assigned someone to that task. Was that a third tactical error?Looking for something specific in too short a timeframe? I don’t know. An ADM I spoke to later argued it was the main reason, and I don’t doubt his judgement, just not sure that it was the only issue at play.
I met first with an old boss who I have used for mentoring and career advice before, and who is now an ADM. I appreciate his willingness to meet with me, and he gave me a good “practice” run in describing what types of things I was looking for in my search. For example, I described it as wanting to fix things that were broken, and he countered by asking if there were any enabling services in the department that weren’t broken. Good point. Hence the narrowing to “recognized problem and desire to fix said problem”, a much smaller list. He had one big suggestion, but it wasn’t active yet, something to perhaps work towards in the future if it got going — department-wide implementation of the GCDocs system. A major challenge for a department of 25K people and little to no IM practices in sight. And he did advise me that as I talked to others, I would need to narrow my “request” if I wanted to get job offers out of it. I wasn’t worried at that point, I was meeting with people who had offered me jobs before, and I suspect I didn’t listen as strongly as I should have (hence my fourth tactical error, not being pointed enough in my approach).
I also met with a DG who I have worked for and with three times in the past. While the last time wasn’t a rousing success, she has offered me two jobs in the last four years and so I wanted to chat with her, see what was happening. She also has a job that interfaces with a lot of corporate operations, so a good source. I confess I fully expected a job offer of something, and she openly said she had nothing right then (she had just staffed something). She didn’t have a specific idea of a problem to be fixed anywhere, but she did steer me toward a branch that is undergoing massive transformation right now. Not very specific in targeting, but general steerage in that direction. Or perhaps TBS.
Now, I had already known of this branch’s massive change agenda, and to be blunt, most of it left me feeling blah. Not because it wasn’t ambitious, but more so because I kept seeing fuzzy descriptions, template processes, and not a lot of actual strategic governance going on. In a branch known for bogging down in processes. Perhaps not rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic, more like giving you a template to report how many deck chairs were still available and giving examples of how the policy on deck chair use needed to be simplified. It looked more like barely contained chaos than a well-run corporate process. And while I could see that as an opportunity too, I didn’t know any of the people involved well enough to want to work for them or to be able to choose which pieces might move and which pieces would self-destruct. A major risk for a career move. I put it on the back-burner for now.
I also ruled out TBS. Which is weird in a way. I was looking for a problem to be solved, something to run like a project, with buy-in to fix it. From what people tell me, that’s 50% of the work at TBS. All the time. But going with that is an almost universal disdain for anything resembling work/life balance. I don’t mind working OT for crunch activities, but I don’t want to start working an extra 10-20 hours a week just for fun. Just not the environment I want to part of, and while I have had offers to go there, it wasn’t on my list of desired places.
I approached a contact I had, actually a former boss of my wife. She offered me a great job about three years ago, and the timing was terrible. If she had been in the same position, with the same offer, I would have said yes now easily. But she was in a new area, and it seemed good too, so I wanted to chat with her. Not for her area per se, but good info on life in the HR world. It was a very pleasant conversation, and she offered to set me up with her replacement in her old area, but I already knew that area was “full”. Always a pleasure to chat with her, but nothing that added up to a specific lead per se.
I threw a Hail Mary pass towards a director that I didn’t know at all, but had found out she was in charge of two HR files that interested me — student hiring for the summer and post-secondary recruitment. Lots of stuff going on, good work, potential to expand if there was an opening for me, but she was full up. She had a manager in charge, and it was a great conversation, but more like being outside with my nose pressed against the window. There are other ways to be involved, but no job in the area. It was a very focused conversation, made so partly because it was easy to say no, i.e. she had no openings. Plus, while she didn’t say it outright, I don’t have a huge HR background for the types of things they’re doing — I’m good at HR processes, coaching, etc., but not a lot of formal experience with the stuff they’re doing. Put more bluntly, I’m an EC, not a personnel (PE) specialist.
I wouldn’t say I was panicking at this point, but I was finishing my fourth interview, and nothing resembling much of a lead had poked up in my e-scan. Nor any job offers. I’m being somewhat disingenuous as I say that, as I did have a previous job offer back in February.
When my boss started the search for my replacement, she had to go to our branch workforce management committee to seek approval to launch a deployment notice. So all of WMC i.e. the DGs in our branch and two ADMs all knew and heard I was officially going to be leaving. And one of my former bosses, now a DG, reached out to say, “Hey when are we going to chat?”
I thanked him for the question, and pointed out that I needed to finish my french, it wouldn’t be for another five or six months, I wasn’t really looking for conversations at that point (I hadn’t started my search yet), etc. So he replied, “So how about Thursday?”.
We met, he described the job, and it was a good job. But I wasn’t convinced it was me. Stakeholder relations, open-ended, targeted to business. I’ve done some of that work before, but not really what I was looking for — I was looking for the Mr. Fix-It type job.
But, while I wasn’t panicking, I thought I should shore up my plans with a good old-fashioned firm job offer. So I contacted my former director who had offered me jobs twice in the last three years and told her that I was now officially looking. And in the interest of transparency, I told her she had to make me a good pitch. Her first pitch three years before had been a back-handed pitch. We had been talking about her job, she told me all that was wrong with it for about 30 minutes, just sharing and venting our own frustrations, and then said, “How about coming to work with me?”. Umm, how about no? 🙂
Her second pitch had been better but it wasn’t my dream job. Yet I was willing to consider it because I really like her management style. We worked really well together before — she generally would treat me as a near-equal for the files, lay out the full gamut of management work to be done, and we would just divvy it all up. There was very little of the “I’m a director so I’m doing the fun stuff, you’re a manager, let me dump stuff on you”, and it was very open and collegial. One of the best experiences I’ve ever had as a manager, and partly as I have a lot more experience now than I did before, so it’s easier for my director to do that with me. And she made me a good pitch. Not my dream job, but again, more interested in working with her than the job necessarily. I explained however that I couldn’t say “yes” yet, I was doing a full search until the end of May at least, and wanted to know if that would cause her problems. No, for me, she was willing to wait.
Great, a firm offer.
What I haven’t mentioned in this post is my boss. She had been, up until this point, incredibly supportive. Whatever I needed, whenever I needed it, what could she herself do to help? Could she make calls, what did I need from her? All great. And she had said repeatedly that I shouldn’t take the first offer, take my time, do a proper search, etc. And I was keeping her up to date as I went.
When I told her about this job, and it was good, but not perfect, I fully expected her to say the same thing as I was thinking. It was a baseline, etc. Except instead she suddenly said I should take it, firm it up, was my french a precondition, etc. The complete opposite of what we had talked about. I was like, WTF?
So I waited a day and then followed up on the job, tried to firm it up. And it evaporated. She didn’t know if she could take me as an EC, they didn’t really hire ECs, not sure she’d have the budget, was I really serious, etc. WTF?
My confidence took a major nose-dive. Was that offer back in February, the one I said no to, was it the only one I was going to get? The one that I thought was a sure thing was gone, disappearing into the mist of the branch that was in chaos. I have no idea what happened, I’ll get the full story some point in the future I guess. Things happen.
So I sheepishly went back to my DG, told her it wasn’t solid, and she went back to full support mode. Totally supportive, no issue at all. I realized afterwards it was a bit of a push/pull thing for her with my replacement. She had found someone and didn’t want to lose them, but also didn’t necessarily want to issue an offer to them until I had found something or had a good line on something. And so when she saw that I had a firm offer with a good boss, it seemed like perfect synergy for us to close both deals simultaneously. But then she realized she could always use me on special projects in the short-term if she had to, so no worries. We worked out a deal for the replacement to start, and I would keep looking. Full support. Whew.
Interestingly in this list, you’ll see that I didn’t talk much about my branch. Other than the one offer that I said no to, nobody was knocking on my door. And, truth be told, I was surprised. I thought more than one would knock, and they all knew I was looking, with no invites to chat. Okay, no worries. And truthfully in retrospect, I was looking for corporate problems to fix, none of which they had in their areas. They were all mostly program policy people.
Soooo, six interviews down, no job. Umm. Yep, I sucked apparently. Maybe I wasn’t as good as I thought. I reached out to contacts in two other branches, never heard back from either one. Okay. Maybe they missed the emails. I personalized them, so they weren’t cattle calls. Or maybe they were just busy. Either way, moving on.
I reached out interdepartmentally. I wasn’t looking to leave the department necessarily, but I also needed to expand my interests. A friend knew of some needs at Environment Canada, but they went more internally for the job that I would have been best suited for…she offered to share my résumé more widely, but I held off on that for now.
A former employee of mine had interviewed with ISED, and since she has a similar profile to mine, she wondered if I might be interested. She referred me, the director interviewed me, and there was some interest. But the job had three main files — one that hadn’t started yet but could be interesting at some point; a trade-related file that tied in well to stuff I did before and would like to do again, but is generally responsive only; and a third area that she suggested was quite “minor” but involved a lot of parliamentary relations. Which I’ve also done in the past. But then I realized. The first two files weren’t really active at the present, and she had five employees in the team. Which meant they were ALL doing the parliamentary relations file somewhat, or at least, it was eating up way more than a small part of their time. Definitely NOT the job I wanted to be doing, so I didn’t firm up interest.
At the same time that I was doing all this, I was interviewing candidates to join my team at the EC-06 level. While I was doing reference checks for one of the candidates at Public Health, their manager asked me about my team, and I mentioned I was moving on myself but I didn’t know where. We were doing similar jobs, and we chatted a bit about our experiences, and he asked if I thought about working at Public Health. One thing led to another, and we set up an interview with his boss. I interviewed with them, seemed okay, but there were a few structural issues that seemed “off”. And there was an element that it wasn’t going to be “new”. It was the same job I had now, just in a different department. But a change is as good as a rest, as they say, and I was interested still. Until I did reference checks on the area. And while I expect a few pluses and minuses to come back in any real reference, I got more of a “run the other way” response from people. Poked a little further and suddenly the structural anomalies made more sense in that context. I withdrew my interest, citing my desire for a change. Which was entirely true. The more I considered the job, the less interested I was in replicating my current role.
I am likely missing some interactions in there a bit, but basically, at this point, I was nearing 8-9 formal interviews, and nothing to show for my search. I needed to be more pointed.
I reached out in the short-term to a colleague in one directorate in our branch, and got the lay of the land for her area, but it didn’t look like a good fit in any open positions, and I put that area on the back-burner.
I contacted a DG contact in the IT branch and had a GREAT conversation with her. Exciting opportunities and one, in particular, sounded promising. She offered to follow up with him, and I wanted to think about which area for a couple of days. I also was targeting another branch, and met with the DG, but it was a short conversation, and she didn’t have any suggestions for me.
But something weird had happened in that timeframe too. I had contacted a DG who formerly worked in our branch, and to be honest, I had forgotten she was in this other branch that I was interested in. It was an area that interested me but I had no management-level contacts and hadn’t figured out yet how to contact them. It was also very different from what I was doing. Anyway, I realized she was in that branch, contacted her, chatted, she asked me what I was interested in, etc. I told her the one general area and she knew one of the DGs was actively looking. I didn’t know him but would be happy to have a chat.
The program was Canada Pension Plan – Disability, or as they refer to it, CPP-D. I have had some exposure to it over the years. Back when I was in university, my father was on a disability pension for a while, which meant I could get a “Disabled Contributor’s Child’s Benefit”. Plus I have family members who are receiving CPP-D and I’ve been dealing with an employee who’s gone through medical retirement in recent years.
And I’ll confess…from a policy perspective, I think pensions are just flat-out cool. I don’t care about the finance side, I just mean all the policy issues that go with them. And disability pensions take that “vulnerable group” and “rich policy area” dynamic, and feeds it steroids. Sure, I was looking for those corporate problems to fix, but if I was to go more policy-oriented, pensions would likely top the list.
I met with the DG and the acting director, and I really liked his management style. Open, transparent, plain-spoken. Kind of a blue-jeans and sports jacket vibe to him. We were supposed to chat for about 30 minutes, and I didn’t treat it as an interview really, mainly because I’m not a pure policy wonk nor am I a stakeholder specialist, which the job entails. But the 30 minutes turned into 90, and I grilled him like a fish on the policy issues. I just let my full policy wonk side run wild during the conversation. Pilot projects, program issues, links with the delivery, Parliamentary engagement, FPT roles.
And I found myself really thinking about the job. Normally, if someone said “Stakeholder Relations”, I would run the other way. Often very responsive, too many dockets coming through. But CPP-D doesn’t deal with “all” disability issues, there’s a separate office for that (Office of Disability Issues). It is geared specifically to stakeholders of the program itself. Clients, insurance companies, FPT partners. And they have a formal roundtable set up that meets on issues through-out the year. Put differently, it’s not “open-ended” stakeholder relations, it is a very structured SR. More like managing a large interdepartmental / FPT / client / partner roundtable plus doing bilateral relations. Now THAT’s a different type of Stakeholder Relations that I can manage. I’ve even done variations of that before. Plus it’s for a vulnerable group that appeals to me from a policy perspective. Kind of like when I was at CIDA — “developing countries” writ large didn’t excite me, but Small Island Developing States did. And I did work on the negotiations on the UN Convention of the Rights of Persons with Disabilities back in 2005-06, so it isn’t like it is completely foreign territory either.
I thought about it for a day or two after the meeting, and my interest didn’t wane. I followed up to confirm my interest, and was happily surprised to find they were interested too, and they didn’t have too many other candidates left to consider. I provided references, we figured out some options around my expired french levels. They were ready to offer and I was ready to accept. Win-win.
Almost.
Way back when my “open-ended” scanning process was on, I thought to impose upon my current ADM for some advice. He is involved in stuff all over the department and has a planning background, so I thought he would be an ideal candidate for some advice if he could spare the time for coffee. We scheduled in early April, and then I got bumped. Again and again and again. It wasn’t urgent, and he’s a pretty busy ADM. A couple of times he had openings when I was off in May with Jacob’s series of appointments. No biggie, we rescheduled. But that meant that by the time I had a chance to meet with him, it was two days before I was to get my formal offer from the new area. I was going to let it go, but my DG encouraged me to meet with him and get his reaction to the job.
We met, I was pretty candid with him about my early experiences in the job search and mentioned I had zero offers in the initial stages. He asked me why I thought that was, and I mentioned targeting DGs and ADMs rather than directors who hire EC-07s. While he agreed that might be part of it, he thought it was more the narrow type of job I was looking for, and that those don’t come around every day. It might take six months to find a specific example of that type, and I was moving faster than that timeline. An interesting thought.
He asked me if I was set on leaving our branch, and I said no, but that I hadn’t really found much interest within the branch either (both from my own searching of work to do / openings or their own expressed interest or not). He pointed out though too that the management all knew me in one specific type of work and thus might not have considered me for other types of files. We chatted about what he thought my real skills were — comfortable creating and telling evidence-based storylines that combine data, policy, and programs together — and about a couple of areas in the branch that might be a fit. And then he offered to reach out to them.
Umm, okay. But I was set to say yes to the other job in two days. He asked if I could extend that deadline by a couple of days, which I agreed to explore. My advisors all agreed that I could be straight up with the new DG about the ADM’s offer, and he fully understood. I told him I was leaning towards accepting his offer, and honestly I would have said at the time that I was 98% sold. It’s just a huge policy rich area, and the DG told me that partly what sold him was that I had an obviously curious mind for policy and I asked a lot of the right questions during the interview, the exact issues they had to deal with behind the scenes and balance out against the public commitments.
So, at the ADM’s nudging, I met with another directorate in my branch. Huge program, lots of policy work across the board. And they had two openings with some great work to do. Two very good jobs. Which left me with an actual question. Stay and do good work in the same branch, where I was comfortable and knew everyone, and would be able to hit the ground at a full run, or move to the new branch, new area, and a huge learning curve.
Interestingly, way back about 20 paragraphs ago, I mentioned that I had met with someone in the branch, this was their area, and I had put it on the back-burner at the time. I had not pursued it as I didn’t see a fit for what I was looking for, and this was very different still. Opportunities we didn’t even know about a month before.
In the end, I realized that I was more attracted to the Disability file. It ties in closer to my social roots, I like the client group, and as I said, it’s a huge policy area with lots of rich pockets to mine.
So I said yes to the new job, and started the countdown from my old job. There were still lots of hoops to jump with various approvals, and I didn’t really tell that many people where I was going officially unless they pointedly asked. There are always chances something will come up, stuff happens. But I started yesterday in the new job so I guess it’s safe to say where I’m “going”. 🙂 I have a slightly smaller team than before, with five employees, including a co-op student, plus a potential sixth coming later. And I probably understand only about a tenth of what the job entails (I only got the basic elements of Stakeholder Relations above, haven’t even touched long-term disability yet).
But it was time for a change and I took the leap on faith.
And then something strange happened. A bunch of people in my old branch said, “What? I didn’t know you were willing to do full policy work? Why didn’t you approach ME?”. Including two areas that I probably would have said yes to early in the process if they had been on the table. Meaning I wouldn’t have considered a larger move to an area that likely suits my interests and skills for the long-run a lot better. But they weren’t on the table, given the way people saw me and that I was originally looking for that narrow “fix-it” job. It all worked out in the end, as they say, but the trip was far more painful than I expected.
I know I made a lot of errors in my planning, which seemed good going in and there were reasons for each leg, but it added to my stress:
Giving up my current job before finding the new one — While it motivated me to actually look, the added pressure was too intense;
Not finding a way (ANY way!) to meet with my ADM sooner — It would have changed the conversation way back at the start, instead of force-fitting it at the end;
Being overly confident — Sure I have high ratings and am flagged for talent management, but that didn’t mean it went well or was easy, although it made it easier for my DG to support me;
Not waiting for my french to be fixed before searching at all — It just added a dimension I shouldn’t have had;
DGs and ADMs are fine for scanning, but I likely should have aimed lower for job offers and been more pointed;
My unique opening target niche was too narrow, and there weren’t any jobs of that type available in the timeframe I had; and,
Since I had been in a specific role for a long time, I didn’t tell people I was open to other types of files too.
None of them egregious, and as I said, it worked out in the end. But definitely not the way to run my career in the future.
On the other hand, I stayed in my last job for 9 years…if I stay in this one for 9 years, I’ll be eligible to retire when I’m done.
I’m sure other thoughts will occur to me in the future…it’s hard to have perspective without some distance between me and the process yet, but this is what I have so far.
In the words of my 7-year-old son, I’m a weirdo pants. And if you look at the way I’m currently managing my career, that might be an appropriate characterization. I took a job 9 years ago in my current branch, and for the first year or so, I was the manager of performance measurement. Then I started a five-year process of “big scary projects” on top of my regular job, often as the sole branch rep involved in it, and the rest of my job kind of moved to the corner of my desk at times. I kept things going, but just based on time and intense focus, the projects were far more important to my work plan than my day-to-day files. Then we reorganized, my director left, I acted for a while, and then I took over as manager for our corporate planning team, subsuming my job as manager for performance measurement, and I’ve been doing that new combined job more or less for the last three years.
So three years ago, I thought, “six years is enough”, and planned to move on. Except I had a great boss and new files. So I stayed. Then two years ago, I thought, “Okay, time to move on”, except again, there was no real incentive. Good boss, good work/life balance, good files, and I stayed. Just over a year ago, I was like, “Okay, time to REALLY move on”, but I didn’t. Sure, I had to get my French renewed first, but even with that in hand, I haven’t been embracing the job hunt. And, honestly, why would I?
I report directly to an EX-03 who gives me a lot of autonomy. I interact regularly with all the DGs and ADMs, and they like my work. Nobody is telling me to fix what isn’t broken, I gained some new financial experience in the last year, I have a great team to work with, the work balance has been good, and I am both good at my job and enjoy it. So why leave? Because I threw my hat in the ring last year for a promotion to get a specific job, and when I updated my résumé, I had to add coverage for the last two years — and I only changed six words.
Never, in my entire career, has that happened. I have always had new files, new projects, new SOMETHING / ANYTHING that kept the renewal constant. But, here I was, now 9 years in the same “box”, and no real change in files or initiatives in the last 3 years. I could have invented stuff to talk about, or rather blew up a few things just to look different, but that’s not the point. It wasn’t how to spin it to look bigger, it was that it wasn’t ACTUALLY different. So I talked to my boss, we started a search for a replacement, and we even posted the job in March for applicants to pose their candidacy.
Why is that weird? Because I have no idea what job I am going to do next.
It’s true, I don’t know. And if the first question out of everyone’s mouth is, “Where are you going?”, the second that quickly follows is, “What do you mean, you don’t know?”. Because NOBODY does that. You find a new job, you quit your old one, they hire a replacement, maybe there’s a gap to cover. But I agreed that I would “train” my replacement although it is more about transfer over of some corporate knowledge than it is “training”. And my boss asked for a month, and that seemed fine. Plus I’m finishing my french.
So she’s interviewing my replacements last week and this, and I haven’t even really looked too hard to find something. Some by laziness, some by agreement, but some of that was by intentional design. Most of the people I’m going to talk to are more senior, and I don’t want to waste their time. It’s a bit of an overstatement, but they do often think “What do I need someone to do RIGHT NOW?”, not two or three months from now. So I didn’t want to talk to them, have them go, “Perfect, start doing this”, and then have to say, “Wait a minute, I’m not free until two months from now.” To which some could conceivably say, “Two months? That’s a lifetime from now!”.
I confess, somewhat both arrogantly and humbly, that I have “options”. Lots of people have said, “Sooooo”, and want to have a chat. So I know I’ll find “something”, but will it be the right thing? If I’m going to do a proper search, and I should this time (although grasping something willy nilly last time worked out well for me!), then I need the time to do the real search, chatting people up, asking their advice.
So I officially started looking today. Reaching out, scheduling meetings. I had been waiting until after May, but someone I respect advised me that it wasn’t too early, particularly if I made it clear right up front that I was looking for something in late Spring, not now. It would slow the conversation pace, slow the urgency of meeting, and people have been saying yes to the meetings. I’ve set up three so far, and two others are pending scheduling. Very diverse groups, very different job possibilities. I have another four or five in mind, and the conversations with the first batch may generate more, or different ones, for the second round. Or they may lead to something that negates the second round. I had two already in the last six months, and one was great but not with the current management structure and one was good, but a bad fit for me on the real work. I could do it, but my heart wouldn’t be in it, even if I love the boss.
I have a good idea of what I’m looking for, partly as I know myself and my interests+skills pretty well, but also because I did a fairly methodical review of my past jobs and what I liked about them. That’ll be in the next post…
Is anybody else looking for a change in their job this year?
