(Super long, probably boring, slightly maudlin, and mildly braggy story to follow.)
Call it “promotion by subtraction.” By subtraction, I mean that my employees have been subtracted from me, allowing to focus all my time and effort on the marketing work that has become an increasing part of my scope during my five years with this employer.
I moved back to Salt Lake City from Houston in 2010 to be closer to the children from my first marriage. When I interviewed with my current employer (an ophthalmology practice specializing in such vision correction procedures as LASIK and cataract surgery), they didn’t really have a job for me, let alone one that would justify the kind of salary I needed. However, my previous employer, a colleague practice in Houston with similar specialties, had apparently called and told them “Hey, OCS is moving out there. He’s probably going to apply for a job with you. Do not let him go to work for one of your competitors.” (Yes, that was extremely flattering to hear.) So they put me in charge of the phone center, front desks (there are three), and medical records, areas which were in need of consistent management. It put ten or fifteen employees under my supervision.
I was of course enormously grateful to my former employer for the glowing endorsement, and for the new employer for basically creating a position for me on nothing more than faith and a say-so. I’ve never really enjoyed managing, but I had done it for years, including at my last job, so I went to work, doing my best to justify my new employers’ faith in me.
Fairly early on at my new company it came out that I’m a good writer, so I was enlisted, first to copy edit for the Marketing Director, then soon thereafter, simply to do all the writing for him. Writing is easy and fun for me, and didn’t cut too deeply into my time for my other responsibilities. (Hell, in a pinch, I could bang out a newspaper ad or website update in the evening, on my couch with a beer in hand. No sweat.) It was also gratifying to have doctors and other people far more educated than myself trust me to be their voice, and to see copy that I wrote being pressed in quantities of tens or even hundreds of thousands.
I existed pretty happily this way until Summer 2013, when the then-Marketing Director left the company. He had been a one-man department (albeit with support from other employees such as myself), but the job had outgrown him in his nine years with the business, and it was clear that he was going to be replaced by multiple people. I volunteered to be one of those people, pointing out that I was already a de facto part of the department. I said I thought I could do even more, and could probably do it without compromising my other responsibilities.
My bosses responded better than I could have dared to hope. Not only did they make me one third of the newly formed Marketing Department, they gave me a nice raise and flew me out of state at their expense to take a week-long course in graphic design, in order to make me of greater use in the new role.
When they told me that they were going to do this, I was all businesslike smiles and handshakes, then went out to my car and wept for ten minutes. It’s a fine thing to be told you’re valued and that you’re doing a good job, but talk is free; it’s another thing entirely to have it shown to you with actions, especially actions that cost money. I’d always heard of companies that invested in their employees, and now I’d seen one up close.
In the two years since that restructuring, I’ve gradually taken on more and more of the work. I went from being simply the typewriter monkey, grinding out copy on demand, to doing entire magazine and newspaper ad layouts myself. I’ve gone from being an Adobe neophyte, to being serviceable, to being kind of an actual wiz these days at InDesign, Illustrator, and Photoshop. I found myself meeting with account reps from television, radio, local sports teams, helping to decide where our media and sponsorship budgets would be spent. The size of my company makes for a kind of Goldilocks situation: the Marketing Department is small enough that I have autonomy and my opinion counts, yet large enough that there’s a serious budget at work. (It felt pretty cool to go to a Real Salt Lake game last month and see on the huge Jumbotron an animated banner that I made.)
However, as my marketing responsibilities grew, my other duties felt the pinch, as did my life outside work. At work, I found myself less available for my employees. At home, I found myself more often than ever answering emails, writing, and doing other marketing-related tasks during my evenings and weekends. I felt conflicted about this: on the one hand, I felt guilty because I had told my employers I could take on more responsibility while keeping my previous ones, and had in fact been given a raise on that understanding, and to my mind I was beginning to falter. That made me feel guilty. On the other hand, as I got into the marketing side more and more, and enjoyed it so thoroughly, my management duties (never my favorite thing to do in the first place, remember), began to seem more and more onerous. I never resented my employees - after five years, turnover had made it so that almost all of them were my hires, and I love them all - but I began to resent that I had to manage them. That only served to make me feel even more guilty. It wasn’t a crisis situation, or heading towards any kind of breaking point, it was just difficult and uncomfortable.
Then, a month ago, seemingly out of the blue, my boss pulled into her office and told me she wanted to make a change: effective more or less immediately, my team would become the responsibility of our I.T. Director. He, another example of my company investing in its employees, started in the call center, moved into being the I.T. guy, and ended up getting his Master’s Degree in information systems (from Northwestern, no less) on the company’s dime. He’s also my best friend. While he’s now an I.T. wiz and one of the core members of the management team, he lacked the “actually being people’s boss” experience that would round out his management skill set. Our mutual boss thought this would achieve two goals at once, freeing me up to concentrate on my greatly expanded marketing role while giving him needed management experience.
I was elated and relieved, but at the same time still felt just a tad guilty. Were they taking my teams away from me because I wasn’t cutting it anymore? Had I let them down? Worst of all, was this a preparatory step, making it easier to fire me later? (Regarding that last one, my imagination can run away from me occasionally.) It’s taken a month, with my work output increased dramatically, and my bosses’ assurances that I’m doing fine, to finally, kinda sorta, get past those worries.
So with enough time now to sort through my flood of initial impressions, not to mention settle into my new role, I can look at this change with a little more detachment. And even with the benefit of that detachment, what I feel is enormously, incredibly happy. I’m beginning to realize that the way I see myself has changed fundamentally - at least as a working professional, which is a significant part of most people’s self-image, I think. I’ll explain.
As I entered my mid-twenties, I was still without a college degree even as my friends were getting or had gotten theirs. It was entirely the result of my own life choices; I had grown up with every conceivable advantage and had squandered almost all of them through poor decisions, lack of focus, and good old-fashioned laziness. After a few more years of iffy life choices, I found myself at thirty, married, with four small kids. That meant that finishing college was no longer a plausible option, as the paychecks absolutely had to keep rolling in lest our creaky ship of a household founder entirely. Exhausted, stressed, chronically sleep-deprived, and constantly broke, I probably wouldn’t have fared any better in college at thirty than at twenty, anyway.
What I quickly realized was that, as a man who had no college degree or professional certification (e.g. electrician, network admin, nurse), but who was intelligent and capable, if I wanted to make a decent salary in a comfortable setting (as opposed to, say, crab fishing in Alaska), I would probably have to do one of two things: sell or manage. By “sell,” I mean sell stuff to the public (cars, homes, pest control, whatever), and by “manage,” I mean manage entry-level employees of some kind (retail, hospitality, call center, etc.). Seeing that I found sales absolutely soul-crushing and management merely tedious, I settled into a career doing the latter, becoming a pretty solid middle manager in a variety of industries. Hiring, firing, scheduling, writing people up for being late, all that Bill Lumbergh stuff, I was your guy.
And as I settled into that career track, I guess I kind of started to let it define what I thought of myself. I would always be a middle manager, and any time I happened to move to a new job or a new place, I would have to hope that the prospective employer would see past my lack of education and see my ability (and realize that he could therefore get a good employee at a bargain price). I didn’t hate it; it just was.
Yet today I’m sitting here with five Adobe CC windows open and no employees reporting to me, and the sky hasn’t fallen. It makes my career here seem exciting and full of promise, and opens up a wealth of new possibilities in the future: if and when the day comes, I can walk into my next job interview with a portfolio (a big one, spanning several different media) as well as a résumé, and present myself as someone with a skill set that was hard-won and is useful. Hell, it’s a skill set that could take me to a different industry if I so chose; I’m not even simultaneously blessed and confined by my extensive knowledge of the eye business anymore. I could get out of managing people forever, without having to go back to being an entry level employee myself to do it.
I just feel incredibly fortunate and humbled by the things I’ve learned over the past few years. I turned 42 a couple of weeks ago, and would never have guessed I’d make a fundamental change in profession at this point in my life. At best, I could have envisioned trying something new ten years from now, when all the kids were grown and taking a step back in pay, or even taking some time off work entirely to learn a new skill or go back to school wouldn’t have been a laughable idea. Yet it just sort of happened, gradually and organically (with some very supportive intervention from my employer), while I wasn’t looking.
It’s a good day today. Thanks for reading!
