BLOBBY'S BLOG

Calling it Quits

It's been almost a year to the day that I told you that I up and quit my old job to take on a new endeavor.

Though linked above, the short version is, my career options, at the time, were limited there and I opted to move back into something I had spent most of my adult life doing - healthcare operations and finance.

The new job was not the end-all / be-all for me. I knew that shortly after I was in. I probably knew it before I walked into my office for the first time, but I'd make it work. And I did.

In the last year, I took a very unprofitable department into the black. Actually, I went positive to budget in eight months. Smell me. I also shored up the front-line staff and started making the professional staff into being less dysfunctional. They're physicians - so, they'll always have a lot of dysfunction, but you try to minimize that. They still have a ways to go.

But, many days there have been a struggle. Not so much at the department level, but at the organization. Too much infrastructure built in where it was a fight to get anything accomplished. At my level I shouldn't have had to go to my boss to fight for me, which ironically, in those cases, he'd have to go to his boss to get her to fight for him and me. So you can see the inefficiencies.

It probably didn't help that since July, I have been being (re)recruited by my former company, albeit passive-aggressively. But I took the bait and began talking to them. Talking became formal interviewing, which became me doing case-studies for them, which became a job offer - which I accepted a few weeks back.

Why wait to tell you now? For one, I normally do not talk about work here and am keeping things vague, at best. Two, I had to hammer out some negotiation things in regards to benefits that I wanted before I officially nailed down a start-date. Three, I hadn't given my notice to my current employer - and as much as I hear from all of you, I owed them the first official notification.

Now, I hate quitting. I hate the moment I have to tell them, "I've accepted a new position". As much as I think guilt is a useless emotion, it runs through me like the Colorado River. So there is a weird sense of irony in this last round when I was to talk with my boss about my impending termination and he beat me to the punch: he'd been let go due to job eliminations.

In a certain way, the pressure was off as I wasn't dumping my department in his lap until he found my replacement. Of course I immediately felt bad for my department since they will not have anyone for a bit to continue the initiatives I've put into place and keep up their successes. I felt bad that I was moving on to a better job and he was moving on to unemployment.

Some of those feelings were immediately quelled when after giving my announcement, even with him being let go, he went into exit interview mode. Really? Now? But then I figured, he was probably thinking if I was leaving and he was going, one of those reason might have been because he was viewed as not being a good boss. (you can see the tumbleweeds and hear the whistling wind and crickets here......but technically, I'm not saying one way or the other...)

While I won't go much into the new job, it is with my old company, it is a new service line, it is a new reporting structure and it is an opportunity that did not exist when I left a year ago. Had it, I might not have left in the first place.

Like I said in my year-old post, some of these people are the best folks I've worked with in my career, so I'm kind of excited to go back and the ones who know I'm coming back are excited. If I could pull it off, I'd have minimal people know and just go in on a Monday and sit at my old desk drumming my fingers on the desk like I had taken a really long long lunch and just showed back up.

....but I don't have to go back, exactly. I will travel about 40% of my time. I can work in the downtown office, or from home - and I'll probably split my time that way.

So I think I've made the right move. I hope I have. Because, if you look on paper, I'm officially what I would call a job-hopper. I hate that more than anything in my career, but to use the phrase I hate more than the plague Sarah Palin, it is what it is.



Song by: Aimee Mann