I took a job at a medium sized company. Not a Global player. Not publicly listed. They can be quite interesting places. You can get a lot more done, quite quickly. I took a pay cut compared to the past as it was, in my mind, only for a short time while I figured things out.

The other thing about medium sized companies is they can have some quite insane people work in them. By work in them I mean lead them. And so it was with this one. It took me less than three days to think “Mistakes, have been made”. But the teams were very young and had a lot of potential. I liked them. I’m an old hand at dealing with madness and difficult people, I’m also very good at what I do so I decided to hang around.

Leadership has gone, more arrived, only to go as well and now we are part of a very large Global company. They gave me a small amount of money as a bonus if I stayed for x amount of time. That time passed in December.

When people ask me what I do in the pub, I say I’m the one with common sense. The one to say “Sounds good, but have you thought about x and y” or “We can’t because of a so we need to look at b”.

I honestly sometimes think it’s a sham of a career because surely everybody should be thinking things like this. But they don’t so I have a job.

My current boss is old skool in more ways than one. A bit of a political charmer but not so up to speed on anything technical or modern. That’s fine if you take advice. My mantra is to employ people who are specialists in things I know only a bit about, and to listen to them. There’s also a lot of change going on and sometimes you have to move quickly. People don’t like change, so when you need to do it – do it quick and show the benefits. I find that people can cope with change when they see progress.

One of the big things we are changing is heading towards being a year delayed. Not good.

Boss also likes long meetings – VERY long meetings that don’t really go anywhere or achieve anything. As others are leaving the organisation they are being replaced with very young and inexperienced people. Which is great if you’re focusing on development…but it feels more like they have the stamina to sit in very long meetings and say “Yes. Wonderful idea” at the end of them.

There are not a lot of wonderful ideas.

Back at Christmas I was working. I needed to give teams a break so I said I’d look after things. I did a lot of thinking around that time as well. I’m getting better at knowing what’s good for me in life. So I decided to make a change. If I really thought I was good at what I did – and sometimes I don’t because we all have a bit of imposter syndrome – then I wouldn’t have an issue with getting another job. Of course the absolute nonsense going on in this Country at the moment might make that a little bit more difficult. But sometimes you need to have faith in yourself.

So I told Boss that the reorganisation meeting we were planning needed to happen, but it also needed to take into account that I wasn’t going to be here beyond the Summer. I was leaving.

I don’t think it’s sunk in for Boss yet. I haven’t handed in my notice as I’ve given him extra unofficial time to work things out. We met for the meeting – lots of conversation, absolutely no solutions.

It’s a shame really. But I’m not going to work 12-14 hours a day to keep things together. Somebody else will pay me more money to do that. Or the same money and I get a bit of my life back.

I’m secretly looking forward to handing my notice in. There will be ructions (great word) when word get’s out.

Its it scary? Well yeah obviously. But I keep thinking about it, and it feels good and right. I have a plan, I have time.

And time will tell.

I sometimes wish my younger self had the wherewithal to think and plan like this.

But I’m not sure life would have been as interesting 🙂