I am often asking questions of my senior leaders about the volume of organizational change that is a constant in the company and what I can do to act as a “shock absorber” for my direct reports and subordinate leaders.
A major customer facing outage resulted in an RCA compiled by yours truly. I found that a critical engineer had quit months before-never backfilled. Work got reassigned to other people. A second event and second RCA, similarly created by me. Same story: an Ops person had left the company last year, never backfilled. A third. Each time I pointed to workloads and capacities. Not because it’s my job to do these things specifically or by expectations of my director but because no one else in the 400 person organization is yet no one else knows how to go looking for this info so it’s sort of become my duty just because I have enough of a damn to start doing it. These aren’t even MY teams, shit just rolls down hill and my team is at the bottom of the shit pipe. Which is something I hoped bringing these results would get action on. They barely have.
What I’ve come to conclude is that my leaders are NOT thinking about these things until someone or something catastrophic forces them to.
If I had the balls I would straight up ask my senior leaders “what would you say it is you do here if it’s taken such severe consequences to start looking at what we’re asking our people to do?”
What’s most saddening: it’s becoming alarmingly common from job to job. It’s forced me to rethink drastically how I’m vetting companies because they do a GREAT job disguising this during interviews.