Jesus:
“No one can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other.”
But four is totally okay. 
Yeah, that is not tenable. You need to report to whoever these four people report to in common. Otherwise, you will get to a situation where everyone thinks their needs are higher priority. And that conflict is going to flow up to someone–who should be your boss.
Might be time to look for a new job.
Spoiler alert - It didn’t work. At least not how I lined it out. But we did get something to work. Unfortunately, nothing else is working. The whole thing is a bit of a disaster.
This is exactly what I’m afraid of. Too many cooks. Some of our work needs to be turned over very quickly, and we don’t have time for nitpicky differences of opinion.
The Gang of Four includes the top person in our organization and his two deputies, so it goes all the way to the top. My direct supervisor left because of the mess that is going on at the upper levels, so he will be replaced, but it’s going to be a long process and it probably won’t happen soon.
I talked to the head of my former department today about some of the things that are going to be affected by this reorganization. I am stunned that no one talked to her (or my supervisor) about how this is going to work.
romansperson, you are absolutely right, but unfortunately I probably won’t be able to find another job here that pays as well as this one, and I can’t afford to take a pay cut. 
I’ve made it through some tough times at work before this (there are lots of posts in old workplace griping threads about my crazy boss), so I know I can do it, but it’s not going to be fun. I would love it if I had enough savings to live on for a while, so I could quit any time if things get really bad.
My new department maybe has four people (no one seems to know for sure). One is the mystery person who I haven’t met. You’d think it would be a good idea for us to meet the other people in our department.
One of the others has signs of being one of those people who like to boss other people around but not do any of the boring work. I do not like this. I do a lot of boring work myself, and I will not be doing extra boring work that she should be doing. I think she will probably apply for my former supervisor’s job, and she is unqualified and does not have the experience. I think one of the Gang of Four will be in favor of that, so it’s possible it could happen. This is like watching a train wreck in slow motion.
Not so long ago, I was thinking about how things were going well at work and I haven’t had anything to post here.
Good advice here.
Also, eat the muffin.
Seanette, muffins make everything better (but only if they’re good muffins). I’m partial to blueberry. Even better if they have some crunchy stuff on top. Tomorrow might be a muffin day if things work out the right way.
There are too many people at my job who are making decisions about things without talking to the people who actually do the work. Also some of it has been extremely disrespectful. The head of my former department found out that the department was being split when it was announced in a meeting. No one talked to her or anyone else in the department before this decision was made and announced. There are going to be complications, but the people in charge don’t seem to care. I can handle one or two of these situations, but it’s happening too frequently, and it’s not going to be fun when I have to clean up the messes.
A small update: I thought I had four bosses, but it turns out it’s actually worse than that. They are not telling us what to do, and I don’t think they care what happens as long as there isn’t a big crisis. It is possible that we could have a very big crisis. It has happened before, and we are understaffed and not prepared.
What is it with weird shit and Mondays? I’m getting a status bar in Outlook… “To get new email, use your browser to sign into company.com” with a button to Open Browser. Clicking the button takes me to… msn.com in Japanese???
While I admit it would be awesome to learn Kanji, this isn’t the ideal way to do it.
I’ll take “Problems I wasn’t expecting to ever have for $500” please, Alex.
I’ve been on vacation for 2 weeks. There is a giant pile of shit I need to do but I don’t want to do any of it! Is 8 years to soon to start a retirement countdown?
One of the other managers this morning at coffee started on about some you tube dude that wrote a ‘comedy’ about someone transitioning to become a rhino or some such. He then did a ‘hilarious’ video where he interviewed various LGBTQ people asking then to define what a woman is. All with the caveat that people’s own business is their own bla bla bla but only after they are adults. Lots of others joined in about how they don’t want teachers putting ideas in kids heads. Add in ridiculous stories of people identifingbas animals.
I ssked everyone that was joining in how they fealt about suicide and if dead teenagers are worth their sense of what is appropriate. Ireally struggle to mind my temper with this stuff and I tell my crew to avoid politics at morning coffee. I am far and away the dominant personality here, and the boss, and I don’t know what to do.
I don’t want to be the bully, but I fucking hate this simplistic shallow take on reality. A take that manifests as reinforcing the cruel status quo.
These are good people, the manager in question is a very kind and generous man. Just somewhat ignorant. Wish I could handle this stuff better.
Nope, it’s only 2922 days.
I have a whiteboard in my office. I think I’ll put the countdown up there and see if anyone notices. I’m aiming for June 1, 2031 so 2909 days from today!
Rant, plus some resultant ha-ha schadenfreude. I’m an engineer in a big company. To “improve quality”, a random high-up executive mandated that all designs, including piddly little corrections like typos and bug-fixes, be accompanied by a long tedious checklist routed through a non-userfriendly tool and signed by management. Said executive implemented mandatory training and videos (“8x10 glossy, circles, arrows, paragraph on the back…except for Alice”) for this initiative that would “restore quality to the highest standards”. Manager in-boxes were soon inundated with these sign-off requests which piled up and started missing schedule performances for these approvals, most of which they had no technical expertise or clue to what they were approving for and were mandatory changes regardless, so pointless to reject.
Apparently pushback was strong, because now 6 months later the policy has disappeared and been memory-holed, and we are free to release our designs again without the “quality”.
I put a countdown widget on my desktop. It was nice to be able to take a look at that every time something pissed me off at work.
It’s not an easy thing to deal with. I’m in HR, and these kinds of issues are coming up in the workplace more often than it used to. I used to handle immigration for my company, and I couldn’t help but invoke Trump’s name when I explained to managers the risks associated with sponsoring an employee for an H-1B Visa. But it was the truth, Trump was actively hostile to immigrants in general and deliberately made applying for a visa more difficult.
I’ve also had the transgender discussion with fellow members of HR. To my disappointment, some of them had very strong opinions on which bathrooms employees should use. And like you, I find these unfortunate opinions coming from people I consider to be fairly good.
My brother had a countdown timer going, and later realized that once he figured in weekends, holidays, vacations and sick days, and the annual conference that didn’t feel like work… he had a lot less time left than he thought.
Word. My 12,023 days left comes to 8589 days.
Wow. Including weekends, I only have 1960 days to go. 
How do you guys know your exact retirement dates. I’m in my mid 50s and I’m not sure if I’m working another four or another ten years.
Perversely the less confident I am about my health prospects over the next ten years, the less likely I am to retire early.
My dream retirement date is my birthday when I’m 70. So 1960 days.