A manager's stool - four months on

Given four months have elapsed since I took up a new professional role. I’m seeing the back of the shake-off period, yet I am still far from being a seasoned leader.

The experience from Szlachetna Paczka, which according to my predecessor on the area leader stool, should have been a dry run ahead of taking charge of a team in a corporate world, has indeed paid off.

I started my stint with a series of sign-up interviews with members of my team. They were meant to mostly break the ice and apparently they have done that job, but those one-over-one talks were mostly to get to know each other's expectations, working style and concerns.

Being knowledgeable in one's area of expertise definitely helps, but is way too little to get ahead as a manager. Leadership involves making use of soft skills. If people ask me how to describe the nature of the recent transition, I reply my role is about solving conflicts, managing emotions and reaching rotten compromises. My self-insight also reveals my paternal instinct is laid on my team.

The most frustrating aspect on the new role are meetings, or rather their number and senselessness of many of them. Their multitude is an aftermath of remote work in covid times when attending a videoconference was a proof of being busy at work. I aim to skip as many calls as possible (getting away with it so far), aiming to keep those I partake in short and finished with conclusions or homework. I frequently do catch up with simpler tasks in the background, but all in all multitasking, critical not to fall behind really badly, is debilitating.

With respect to decisiveness, I have had no inhibitions rising up to this. Mostly likely because I have long been fed up with senior managers getting paid for decision-making and shunning such responsibility.

Since the beginning of the year I have constantly been overloaded with excessive duties, regularly short of time, learning to live with overdue stuff despite working overtime and not getting extra paid for that (the Polish labour code does not envisage overtime pay for managers).

A bright glimmer of hope is that soon 3 out of my 8 corpo-children will be taken away from me (a new manager hired this month). Sadly, people around her (including me) are short of time to onboard her, which is an absurdity since she can't take over some of our work because of our ineptitude.

All in all, life has become more stressful and fatigue-abundant. Over weekends I keep away from work and my mind is free of work-related thoughts, but even despite that it takes me much longer to regenerate. Long-term weariness is also a side effect of not taking longer holidays since June 2025, a shortage of days off I might catch up with no earlier than in late May.

Becoming a manager (at work)

For many years I would think leadership was not for me. I preferred to pursue the alternative professional development path, i.e. becoming an expert in a certain area, having an independent advisory-profiled position and not having to wrangle with any subordinates.

I revised my approach in 2022 when I took over as an area leader in Szlachetna Paczka. I was in charge of 25 people, recruited by my seasoned companions or myself, found my way around it stunningly well, which was additionally backed by glowing praise towards my management style expressed in the feedback (passed on anonymously to my bosses) past the edition.

I was lucky to have reasonable and reliable people in my team and back then I realised the comfort of being a boss lies in the team you lead. Wise, reliable and communicative people can make leadership a pleasure, while the opposite type of people can turn it into a nuisance and an ordeal.

The generously employer-subsidised (until March 2027) Skoda Octavia has hindered my motivation to seek new challenges outside my current workplace, hence for a while I had been on a lookout for an opportunity window, i.e. vacancy on a managerial position. In March 2025 one of senior B-1 managers decided to quit. His departure triggered a knock-on effect which resulted in a team head vacancy to be filled.

The recruitment process was more demanding than I thought and I can boast of approaching it with carefully-thought-out plan and vision. I believe this contributed most to my nomination. I did not have to prove my hard skills, as I had been doing that for past 11 years. In a modern corporation soft skills matter most and they are examined during interviews. With hindsight I recall those checks as suitable for a senior executive rather than for an ordinary team leader.

I am looking forward to new challenges, yet with some fears at the back of my head. I slightly worry if my subordinates accept me. A crucial detail is that I am returning in a different role to the department where I worked between 2018 and 2023. On top, there is a risk some people I will be in charge of applied for the same position and were rejected. I will need to learn my team members' work style and come to terms with the fact not everybody is an anti-procrastinator, not everybody's business English is as good as mine, not everybody minds neatness of documents as I do (apologies for this one-off lack of humility). I will be forced to attend some dead-end meetings which since the onset of remote working have become a plague in corporations. Their side effect is work piling up and needed to be done overtime for which I will no longer be eligible a compensation (such is the labour code in Poland). And on top, I will need to grapple with office politics...

The new chapter officially starts tomorrow, but customarily for internal transfers, the transition from the current to the new position is actually a process spread over time. Keep fingers crossed for me.

An internal transfer

In six months it will have been a decade since I joint my current employer. With ups and downs and moments of both satisfaction and frustration, the overall balance of that professional relationship is positive, hence I'm soldiering on.

My first promotion (to a "senior analyst" position) came into effect in January 2018 and it involved a transfer to a parallel unit. I have carried on here until now, with one more promotion (I am an "expert" since September 2022) along the way. Six years in one place make up nearly a half of my career and are much enough to necessitate a refreshment. 2023 was the most difficult year on my professional path. An uphill portfolio of clients, instrumental role in an uphill multinational project and uphill mentoring to non-promising juniors have taken their toll on me. The workload at times was unbearable. I worked very efficiently, but could not make it within 8 hours, so I had to do overtime, frequently handling two things at the same time, despite that I got behind with work and assertively refused to take up even more tasks on my back. In December I was sick of it...

At the beginning of 2023 my previous (2018 - 2022) manager took over headship of a newly set up specialised financed unit. We'd got on with each other more than well, so in 2Q2023 we began negotiating my transfer to his new bereau. A green light was in place in late May 2023, with the very transfer delayed until early 2024 to let me sort several things out and to give my managers time to find two FTEs (speaks volumes of my workload) to replace me (they failed to do so).

In the new role, starting over on 1 February, though the transition period has begun now, I will need to learn a lot. I will see the back of taking care of not particularly bright juniors. Hopefully, my workload  declines, to be closer to "reasonable", which will be still a step ahead after what I have gone through in 2023. Combing career development with slowing down appears to be a challenge, time will tell if I am up to it.

Tribulations at work

For a while I have not shared many news from the corporate front, where the goings-on have been anything, but uneventful in recent months.

In September 2022 I was awarded a promotion. I had not held out for it, I had not strived for it, it came unbidden, although I perceive it as a well-deserved distinction. It involved a below-inflation pay rise, theoretically the same scope of duties, but in practice I am supposed to serve as consultant / advisor to less competent employees. That very change has not been a tremendous one.

In early December 2022 I learnt my manager with whom I had worked for 5 years would be promoted as of January 2023 and would be in charge of a newly created bureau. His promotion was well-earned too and I wished him all the best on the new career path, but on the other hand I regretted our paths parted for a while.

Also in December 2022 the vacancies we had had in our team and which generated additional workload were filled. Instead of hiring one senior analyst, somebody resolved to take on two absolute freshmen (graduates). I heard payroll of two junior analysts was lower than amount claimed by experienced professionals. Whether such savings pay off is debatable, since it takes much more time and effort before freshmen become value-generating staff.

In early January 2023 it transpired that the head of my department would go on a six-month sabbatical starting with the beginning of February. Actually it would not mean a great change, had it not been for a fact his responsibility for co-ordinating a multi-geography project on Poland level has been laid on me.

On 16 January 2023 my new manager had his first day at work. He is an experienced professional, open-minded, communicative, competent man and after three weeks I believe he is one of few outstanding bosses. In the meantime I have to assist him in finding his way around the new organisation, but this effort already pays off.

On the same day I became a mentor for the two freshmen, with a mission to bring them up into card-carrying credit analysts. So far my efforts go mostly down the drain. They lack basic knowledge SGH graduates should possess. This could be made up for with a bit of time and patience, but their brightness leaves a lot to be desired. They are determined to learn, but instead of comprehending causations, they attempt to memorise things, which does not bode them well as analysts. I have already shared my observations with our managers and at least they agreed after a probationary period some difficult decisions might need to be taken.

Under all the circumstances above, my workload is now a bit of excessive – my portfolio of clients is larger than of any other person in the department (and some of accounts are troublesome), I co-ordinate a project, I look after freshmen and help my boss. In return I have negotiated official overtime I register and will be paid for. In a short term, this makes sense and is equivalent to a 30% - 40% pay rise, but within a perspective of a few months I would definitely prefer not to work more than 45 hours a week and spend my off-work time in a more appealing way that doing overtime.

Promotion

Perhaps the best strikes out of the blue, perhaps.

December 2016

After a few drinks on a Christmas party my boss suggested we needed to have a longer chat. I had awaited this conversation for weeks and had hoped he would appreciate my hard work and signal an imminent promotion and pay rise. Over the next days I kept insisting he did not go back on his promise and so we eventually landed in a conference room. My boss simply wanted to ask me how I felt, overburdened with work. His reason to have a chat with seemed so absurdly silly that I straightforwardly asked about my prospects of promotion. He honestly reassured they were none…

February 2017

Annual appraisal. During an hour-long meeting to talk over my performance over the previous year I learnt whatever I had done superbly, I had just lived up to my superiors’ expectations, but whatever mistake I had made (the more you do, they more likely you are to make an error, statistically) I had been destined to be rebuked over. Then I took out a sheet of internal memo on promotion criteria to prove I had met all requirements set out in the document. My boss rebuffed this, claiming those guidelines were just a bare minimum and meeting all targets did not automatically qualify me for a position upgrade, but was just a condition precedent to it. At the end I was told the reason why I could not be promoted was that I displayed “emotional immaturity”. I immediately demanded examples of behaviours proving my lack of maturity. Needless to say the assertion of my emotional immaturity had no backing. That appraisal was held on Friday. The weekend thereafter in a spurt of anger I sent out CVs to competitors of the New Factory.

March 2017

I attended two interviews with other financial institutions. Even if in terms of competencies I was eligible, with hindsight I found out my pay rise expectations had priced me out of any considerations. In terms of salary growth, banking sector bucks the trends visible on the labour market. Had I even gotten a higher position, I would have had to accept a similar or lower base salary, not to mention I would have given up on a generous bonus.

April 2017

Found a job opening for a senior position in a similar area at the New Factory. I knocked on some doors to senior managers’ offices and shed some tears over my hapless situation. They were meant to play the cards right.

May 2017

I attended a serious of informal meetings with my would-be superiors (would-be boss and his boss) and once they decided they would take me on, I officially applied for the position. For the sake of transparency, a full-blown recruitment procedure needed to be run before they would select me.

July 2017

Meeting with candidates for my position dragged on for weeks and eventually nobody, including me, was offered that position just because the vacancy was either cancelled or put on hold. My hopes were dashed, actually I was not officially turned away. In the HR system my application was not even rejected, I only received a message the process had been completed. Actually since in the meantime my priorities had changed, the loss was not that painful.

September 2017

Shortly before my holidays gossips about substantial reshuffles in the organisational structure were put about. With little hopes to win, I began to wonder how to take advantage of the changes.

11 October 2017

My would-be boss dropped me an e-mail with an urgent request to meet up and asked whether I was interested in that job any longer. I came over, showed some reserved interest and declared I would need to think it over seriously, especially since some time had passed.

12 October 2017

I met a boss of my would-be boss to haggle over my base salary. The basic they offered was some 15% higher than my current one, yet I feared with much lower bonus multiplier, my all-in after-tax remuneration would go down by some 10% – quite astonishing side effect of a promotion, though you must remember bonus multipliers may change any time and the only bonuses you could be certain of are those ones already transferred into your bank account.

13 October 2017

Pay bargaining turned out to be successful. I got more that they wanted to offer me two days earlier, yet still less than what I held out for while applying. I accepted the base salary, bearing in mind how much some of my ex-workmates who had changed jobs recently earn. We nailed down the deal, yet before I sign the annex to my job contract, my promotion and pay rise remain in the realm of gentlemen’s agreements and the New Factory still stands a chance to double-cross me (it can boast of track record of mistreating its employees).

The unexpected goings-on from recent days prove one timeless regularity – the less you care, the better things shape up. Same happened to me a few months ago when after several spectacular mistakes in the love life, I decided to give up on looking for girlfriend. Less than a month later I dated somebody and future still looks bright.