Upon Reflection

It’s interesting how they always advise people to “sleep on it” in order to get a new perspective. In my blog yesterday, I deliberately captured my first reactions yesterday to being asked to be the acting manager when Carina leaves in a month, because I suspected that my perspective would shift, and it has. Don’t worry, I’m still accepting the challenge 🙂

But for one thing, I’m no longer angry with Sandia. They have a set of priorities (their mission), and environmental compliance doesn’t rank highly in that mission. They are not obligated to me to make good use of my time if it isn’t in their best interest to prioritize that, when they have so many other priorities. Yes, my previous boss wasn’t that useful for my career, but he was probably doing the best he could. And the entire department was simply not a priority for the company.

I’m also not sure that I actually should have left earlier. I enjoyed the Sandia job fairly well until we moved to California. And then we needed the money! And it’s a good thing I didn’t get a different California job because it would have made it harder to move back to New Mexico.

In some ways my time at Sandia might have held my career back a little. But it was also a very interesting company to work for, and that experience gives me a perspective on industry that some of my colleagues here don’t have. I now regulate companies like Sandia. So it’s useful to have been on the other side of the table.

For example, some of my colleagues here think of the facilities that they regulate as one entity, with one motivation. They assume that all companies are just trying to get away with as much as possible. But it’s actually way more complicated than that. They don’t realize that the internal environmental specialists may be trying very hard to keep the company in compliance, but they may not have the support of the mission staff or the mission staff’s management. There really isn’t any such thing as “a company.” There are lots of people within companies, all with different roles, different goals, and different sets of perspectives and motivations.

I’m still somewhat surprised that my management chose me to be the acting manager. But I’m realizing that they really don’t have anyone else to do it! I have a lot of great colleagues here in other groups, but they are already very busy with the tasks of their own group. They don’t have bandwidth to be responsible for another group, unless that group is already fully staffed with experienced employees (that wouldn’t be us).

The groups are small, only about 4-6 people, so the group managers aren’t just doing management tasks; they are responsible for the same kinds of work as the rest of their group is doing. I would call it a “Team Lead” although that term is used differently in different companies too. Anyway, unless there’s a personnel issue, the management part shouldn’t take too much time. I think my biggest challenge isn’t the added management duties, it’s the fact that we’re going to be short staffed (3 of us instead of 4), and 2 of us are brand new employees. Leaving only one who knows what he’s doing! (He doesn’t want to be a manager, or I’m sure they would have asked him do it.)

I’m tired, thinking about it all. But I’m also definitely motivated to learn as much as I can as fast as I can.