Long-time Women in Transport ally Neil Pepper MBE shares a personal story of the difficulties around landing in a career role that doesn’t play to your strengths, and the courage it takes to get out of it.
Currently I’m rather enjoying my job. It has some pretty dire moments: as a Compliance Manager, my role always tends to bring me into conflict with someone somewhere most weeks. But on the whole, right now I’m on an up-cycle in the normal rollercoaster of emotions that working for a living produces.
With this in mind I thought I’d share a story from when things were considerably different.
For many years I worked entirely alone, part of a team but completely isolated from them by the fact that I was, at the time, the only one who worked nights. Slowly over the years others were placed with me, and one day it was suggested to me that I should oversee those I was working with. Not really a promotion, more of one of those localised agreements that seems logical at the time and looks like a good idea.
From that position I eventually morphed into a full-blown night manager of a small team. Great, you might be thinking, well done, onwards and upwards! Well it turns out that although people often say they think I am a great people person, I really was not when it came to managing individuals.
My work life changed beyond recognition. My nights were filled with endless issues from the team members, each of whom had demands and problems, and there was always some drama or domestic upset that seemed to overshadow most days.
The burden of people issues just grew and grew, and the weight of the problems felt like a millstone around my neck. My inability to manage the problem was only exacerbated by the fact that, although I was called a manager, I didn’t actually have any line manager privileges over the team members — a flawed and intolerable model I can see very clearly now.
I’d never actually applied for a people manager’s job, but when the ad hoc opportunity arose I thought I’d best crack on with it, as a refusal would be one of those career-limiting moves we all fear. I found I struggled with underperformance, being quite intolerant of what I felt was unwillingness to learn or to follow the party line passed down from my managers for dissemination. I realise now with the clarity of hindsight that my expectation that all team members would perform at an equal level was foolish, for there will surely always be a top performer, a bottom performer and a middle group in every team.
I didn’t much like the person that I became doing this job. I knew I was being sharp, short-tempered at times, and struggling with the whole thing I hated where this decision had taken me. Eventually of course it had a detrimental effect on my health, and when I could stand things no longer I took the plunge and self-referred to occupational health, where I had a very sympathetic health professional tell me what I already knew! “No brainer” said the doctor, “if what you are doing now makes you unwell and what you used to do didn’t, then go back to doing what you used to do!”
So I did, in a moment of what I now see was blind courage, I told my manager I no longer wanted to do the role. In effect I chose to demote myself. It was an odd time, no one really knew what to do, and for a short time I had a period of reasonable adjustment that didn’t really achieve much, and then things got more formal and I was told I would return to my former role as one of the team members in the team I had previously been managing. In fact it was a straight substitution: I stepped out and one of the team members stepped into that role. I stand to be corrected but I bet there aren’t many who have experienced this particular change of dynamic out there.
So here is where things got really strange. I became what I can only describe as a “non person”. It was as if all my prior knowledge and experience counted for nothing. People stopped asking my advice. My opinion was of no consequence. I was pretty much ignored and most surprisingly of all (something I’d never considered, if somewhat naively) I found that people I’d previously considered as friends stopped wanting to have anything to do with me! My notional authority removed, it seemed I’d become of no value to know any longer.
Eventually when this non person status became too overbearing, I met with my former manager and had it out with the person. I can vividly recall now saying “I took my stripes off, I didn’t take my brain out”. Things improved slightly, but I could see there was no possible future in the situation for me. A situation of my own making, yes, my own fault perhaps, well yes maybe, but I’d no idea how the ripples of the self-demotion would continue to ruffle my own emotional and professional pond at the time I decided I had to do it.
Eventually I found myself a potential means of escape and moved away to another manager. I was pulled back into the team again twice more through departmental transitions, where I applied myself more fully and changed roles, applying for a job outside the department I’d previously worked in.
So how do I think and feel about it now? Well, what strikes me most is that I am sure to those I disliked managing so much I’m just another in their own personal stream of useless managers who passed through their professional lives (I know we all have such a list, right?). It turns out that no matter what the situation that led me into it, I was doing something that was absolutely not for me and as such it was doomed. Hopefully my inability to adapt to that particular role will not have been too damaging to those I was in charge of. They all still speak to me when I see them at any rate.
The point I am coming to here is that I expect I’m not alone in having found myself doing something I was completely unsuited to and not good at. And although you may not be able to see over the parapet of that particular trench at the time, there are in fact better places for you out there where you can do what you do best and be yourself. Clambering out into No Man’s Land takes courage and a little faith that things will work out, but they did for me.
Do you have a story to share from the last 20 years of Women in Transport? We’d love to hear it.