Things at work have been interesting, in the "may you live in interesting times" sense.

I don't like my manager as manager. He's a great fellow geek, he's an excellent lab manager, he's a fantastic router-jockey, he's a good test developer, he's a legendary tiger-team network troubleshooter. (In my context, "tiger team" is collection of last-resort firefighters, the guys you call on when major money is on the line.)

The problem is, he's being called on as fellow geek, lab manager, router jockey, tiger team as well as test lead. I'm getting short shift, and he knows it. Even before I was under him, I told him that he's not a good manager because he has too much responsibility elsewhere. He knows it, he agrees.

To be fair, he could be a great manager, too. He just needs to be able to tell people, "NO!" enough times that they go to the right people. (Of course, he needs to train those 'right people' first. Details, details.) He's the sort to do well at any reasonable goal he sets for himself, if allowed to dedicate himself to it. He has passion. That's what makes his current 'curse-of-many-hats' situation such misery.

So he's taking steps to move back to individual contributor. Good for him! Good for the rest of us, too. His has strong expertise in many areas, and it'd be a loss for the rest of us if he were to move on, either to another division or another company.

There's just this one matter of me.

One of the 'action items' he gave me to work on when we met before Christmas last year was to not be so shy and reserved. My biggest strength is that I know where I'm weak, so I don't make that blunder. Of course, my greatest weakness is that I don't know where I'm strong, so I don't shine.

Anyhow, my manager (he's still my manager, though not for long) told me that I needed to be more vocal. I could be wrong, so long as I was wrong for a good reason. People needed to know that I was thinking. They needed to know that, if I had enough facts, I'd make good decisions, ask the right questions, etc.

Well, I got around to that, finally. I found my inner voice. So three days ago, he called me into his office and gently gave me additional advice, that I needed to careful not to digress the meetings, etc. To his credit, he did say that I was doing exactly as he said, so this wasn't a chewing it, it was a fine-tuning.

Like I said, he could be a great manager if he had less hats.

I'm not a great 'social engineer,' but I figured I should know who was displeased at my contributions, and perhaps more details.

As the adage goes, "Go with your strengths." Those of you who know me know that I apologize a lot. A lot a lot. If there's one thing I'm good at, it's apologizing (except to excess.) So I went around to the handful of fellow attendees and apologized to each in private. Nothing serious, just a, "Hey, I understand I was running off at the mouth a little back there. I'm sorry."

Everyone said, "Hey, it was nothing," save one. He did give me more advice about scope[1], timing, etc. Same thing almost word-for-word I heard from my manager, so I knew I found the bothered party, and I knew he knew that I knew that I was overboard and trying to correct things.

Later that day, my manager beckoned me over again and said that he made further inquiries and the others didn't think I was that out of line, so he told me not to worry about it. Lessons learned, and so forth. Only problem is, I am still worried about it.

The one guy who was a little bothered is going to most likely be my new manager.

===

1. In this context, an example of scope is asking "Is this a 'where we're going' sort of meeting, a 'what we're trying to do' one, or a 'how we're going to do it'?" Asking 'how we're going to do it' when we don't know exactly where we're going isn't always productive. Yes, we do need to keep in mind our inherent limits, so we don't say "A picnic on the moon!" but aside from those pathological cases, I needed to keep scope in mind.