Meeting the new BOSS

I am thinking we have a lot to do and no time to wait for her. The swivel chairs were anxiously swinging back and forth. I am looking at my watch; others are looking rather frustrated.

She comes into the room 10 minutes late. There are 11 of us sitting around the long wooden table. She apologizes for being late. We were at her mercy, it did not matter what we thought. Collectively, we smiled.

Now I know how it feels to have an entire room of people with more important things to do than hear a message from the new boss of the business unit we support. It made me mad, when she did not show us the respect for our time. She is from the business side of the house. We are the systems side. The business demands that we meet their time frames, their budgets and apparently to wait for them when necessary.

We are under a great deal of pressure to accomplish a great deal of work in a very short time. Our new boss, on the systems side, told us in his all-hands meeting that he wanted to do more, faster; not the cliché more with less; but more, faster. Here we had a situation, where we were doing nothing.

Bad Start. She should have hit the reset button; rewound the tape; stopped the TIVO and started over when we were ready for her.

Funny thing, though, she did not only show us a lack of respect, but she proceeded to tell us that our systems are deficient, not just insufficient, but deficient. Why would you tell the systems people supporting your systems that their work is deficient? Was it to motivate us? Or did she not know that we were the systems personnel? Or was there a secret way getting the systems personnel to feel good about themselves? I don't know, it made sit and think about how I should present myself to her.

She wanted to hear from each of us. Sort of round table what we do. I hesitated for a while. I did not know what to say to her. I was angry, but I wanted her to understand that we were the systems folks with the deficient systems.

I am also the most gregarious of the group and could not stop my self from explaining the hardships of the project we are on. Probably a bad idea, but I was very careful about how I spoke of the other teams and organizations.

I gave dates of implementation and spoke of our plans. She was kind enough to say what a large responsibility it was. I tried to deflect saying that the entire team was responsible and that it was not only I but my entire team. I am sure I came off sounding self-serving and that was not my intention.

I spoke with one of the programmers after the meeting and he said exactly what I was thinking. So clearly her message got across to the programming team.

Moral: Know your audience or they will not get to know you or your message