Cross Road

I am at a cross road now. I managed a technical team in my job today.

My boss wants to change the composition of a purely technical team to include sales, marketing and technical without additional headcount. This has a few implications:

1. I will have to redeploy some people to other areas i.e. help them find another job . To backfill them, I have to look for sales and marketing people instead

2. our existing services to our customers will be affected because I will have less technical people to do the work

3. my role will change from a technical manager to a sales/marketing manager.

My boss doesn't seem to care about the technical services we have rendered thus far, which explained why he could just change the set up of the team, just like that. In fact, during this change, we both agreed that I am not the right person for the new role he envisioned it to be. However, he told me he appreciated my contributions and would like me to take on a regional technical leadership role that he planned to create.

I am not so keen on that regional role mainly because I don't want to work for him anymore. The regional role will carry the same set of measurement I carry today.. maybe more.. but I have less resources to execute it. Knowing his style, he would delegate all technical problems over to me and I forsee that I will have a challenge to support it mainly due to lack of resources. I cannot hope to get guidance from him. Having worked for him for 1.5 years, I can only dream of any guidances from him. I could forsee me going to the monthly review with his boss and got shot at and he probably not helping much / or he giving suggestions which are not executable.

Two of my key leaders are affected by this and will be moving out. It shows how 'cold' he can be. It also shows how much he appreciated all the hardwork/success we have put in. He has no part in growing the team to where it is today but he exercised the power to claim it as his own and change how he envisioned it to work. Now, I will have to take on these two leaders' responsibilities, including daily execution and operations. Capacity would be a problem on my end. I forsee even longer hours. Which is not an issue if I were highly motivated or I feel it is worth to go through this for my boss .. Unfortunately I don't feel that way.

We are going through the transition. I need to ensure that my team transition successfully and manage any issues that are bound to surface. After this, I will need to look out for myself. I have to look for a job either internal in the company or external.

At the moment, I am not feeling at the top of the world. I need to pick myself up and continue to maintain a high life-state. These challenges are inevitable and I need to address them with a clear mind. If I wavered, you could imagine how the current staff would feel. So I need to be strong like an oak, even though I am fighting against a turmoil internally.

Wish me luck and success!