A reader writes:
I spent three years working on a project mostly on my own, taking the relative industry certifications and whatnot.
Last year, my company went through a reorganization, where my team got split in two and I’ve discovered by accident that upper management has assigned the project to a new hire from another team.
I’ve talked to my manager about this and he also was blindsided by it, especially because three days before I was complimented on my performance. I’ve raised the issue with the appropriate people and I do believe it wasn’t personal. But I still feel mortified about the whole experience, to the point that I’ve dropped every task related to the project as much as I can get away with. I feel unmotivated and I’m starting to hate my job. This happened several months ago, and I’m still angry.
The other team is making an effort to include me, but it feels performative, especially after no one told me about the reassignment and I had to figure it out on my own, feeling insane in the meantime. I feel like I’m being disrespected over and over more than being kept in the loop.
I don’t know how to survive this situation, because even if I talk about being unhappy, realistically there’s nothing I can do and no one is going to give a promotion or a new project to the person who was just demoted. Is there some perspective I’m missing? Or it’s just really the time to jump ship?
Well, you say you believe that it’s not personal … but you sound like you do feel it’s personal. You’re talking about feeling mortified and disrespected, and those are both very personal emotions. If it really wasn’t personal, then there’s no disrespect here. So I think you’ve got to get clearer in your head about what “not personal” really means — and if you believe that the decision wasn’t personal (which sounds correct!), then the next step is to see if you can really let that sink in so you can recalibrate the way you’re responding.
The reality is, this stuff happens at work all the time. Projects get reassigned, especially during reorgs, and sometimes it’s for weaknesses in the first person’s approach, and sometimes it has nothing to do with them at all and the decision is made for reasons completely unrelated to their work. What particularly sucks here is that no one had the professional courtesy to tell you that a project you’d owned and invested in for three years was being reassigned. That’s a pretty potent way to damage someone’s trust, and it’s probably why you’re struggling with this as much as you are.
But your brain has made up a story about what it means — that the people you work with don’t value you and this is a professional humiliation — while the facts in play (you were complimented on your work, your manager was blindsided too, there was a reorg that split your team, and they’ve continued to try to involve you in the work) don’t actually make it look like it was an criticism of your performance. Can you work on getting the story in your brain to be, “They made a decision about ownership during a reorganization and handled the communication badly, but the poor communication isn’t a judgment of my value”?
I do think you’re wrong to think no one will give you a new project because this one was moved away from you; that’s not how this stuff normally works. You should talk to your manager and ask what you’re expected to own now and whether there’s still important work you can lead. And if you ultimately conclude that their treatment of your career is incompatible with what you want, then yes — it makes sense to move on. But it should be based on taking a real look at what your future can really look like there.
The post I was removed from a project and I can’t get over it appeared first on Ask a Manager.
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