I don't have the energy to make it upstairs to have dinner, so I'll write about work.
One of my strengths is that I can, believe it or not, generally interpret people. I'm pretty good at figuring out people's working goals (not the same as their stated goals, long term goals, whatever-- just what they're looking for from an interaction) and putting that information to use. When there are multiple parties involved, I'm pretty good at interpreting those working goals from one person to the other person.
I can also sort out my own working goals and translate those for whoever I'm talking to. I can also, once I know a bit about a system, immediately spot holes in implementation and in efficiency, or rather, in the trade-offs of varying kinds of efficiency.
Furthermore, I'm pretty good at keeping meetings going usefully and efficiently when the people running them start flailing.
When I'm impressing people at work I'm generally trading on these skills.
It's just exhausting.
I haven't been doing a ton of this at work lately; I haven't been incentivized to do it. I just take care of my little corner of the universe. The last couple months has had some work meetings that, whatever management tried to make them look like, were a bit of a cage match for person power/defend your program/whatever. That culminated in today, which... I'd just had the work I liked taken away from me, and been dropped another contract management and data review sort of thing in my lap, this one with extra extra fiddly rules that few people know about so I'm almost certain to do things wrong.
I think I'm going to have to step into politicking if I want to do what I want to do. Sell the idea that it's important to collect data (!!) with some shiny graphs and numbers, and also do a sales pitch for my colleague who does the same thing I like doing except he's better at it than I am, so we can keep the program. He's feeling (reasonably) defensive, and I'm not sure-- ugh.
I'm pretty sure management's goal wasn't to lower our impossible-to-hire-for staffing even further by threatening to give them all work they didn't like, but it happened. I hate this part. I hate where I can get involved, gently steer people (management could use some training in how to handle people in a story-and-incentive-based way, people could use a different lens through which they could market themselves without feeling defensive, the meetings could use structure, a good opening, and better clarity on results and take-aways, blah blah blah) and then end up running things and then I have to keep running things. Running things is exhausting.
These are the skills that get me called manipulative. I used to feel like it was just being helpful to use them. Now? I think people should learn their own goddamn people management skills if they're being paid to manage people.
We'll see what I end up doing: stepping up, just doing a bit of marketing, or stepping back and letting the whole thing do what it will.
One of a couple highlights though: when my supervisor opened up his laptop to load the presentation, the windows opening screen had a couple different autism adverlinks in it. Because those are tailored ads, it's super likely he's been looking into autism. I don't think it's on my account; I'm not out. So that's kind of cool.
OTOH Windows should probably be sued into the next century for disclosing that kind of thing on the opening screen.
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