Lilypie

Friday, June 13, 2008

A Good Or Bad Head?

I am really pissed with my Head. With the previous guy, he could rave and rant and be so crude and rude, but at the end of the day, we did have a somewhat good working relationship. This current one, he is soft-spoken and quiet, but I really cannot tolerate him! I thought it was my own problem, but it turned out my entire department (and some others) could not tolerate him as well! Nothing to do with his character, but more his working and management style.

Firstly, he treats me like an unschooled, uneducated, illiterate idiot. When he talks to me, he switches to simple language, which is fine, except he will keep saying, "Do you understand me? Do I have to make it simpler?" I feel like telling him, "Yes, I understand you perfectly, and no, you do not have to make it any simpler, because I speak quintessentially English. And I speak in sentences, not words."

Actually, I already got his point within the first few minutes, but he kept thinking that I could not understand him so went round in circles. I felt like telling him to just stick to the point, instead of going a big round, because I got what he wanted to say!

What really pissed me off was that, all along ever since I started working for lawyers, be it in law firms or in-house, I had been treated like a professional executive. No doubt I am not a law graduate, so not able to practice, but I had been doing a lot of other things besides giving legal advise. I had been drafting agreements, proof-reading agreements, extracting key points and important clauses. I had been doing all these even before I joined this company.

When my previous Head came on board, he said I was capable of more stuff, so he put me in charge of property transactions and the intellectual property database, besides full contracts management and records. It feels really good to be recognised this way.

Now, this current one is trying to revamp the whole system. He wanted a central database for contracts, which is just to improve on the existing one we have. And he wanted a tracker where the key points of the agreements, expiry dates, commencement dates and option to renew would be recorded. He got me started on the formatting of the list, which is fine because I am the one taking charge of all the agreements and extracting all the information in the first place.

When I did up the list, he called for a meeting. In front of everyone in the team, he said that I am not a lawyer, so I cannot be doing the contracts tracking. Only lawyers can do it. That got me really infuriated. All along I have been given tasks befitting a lawyer except to give advise, and now I am relegated to just a mere despatch or data entry personnel of sorts?

Fine, if he thinks I am an idiot, I can feign ignorance as well. But now, he sent me an email with the list, telling me that we are running out of time, so can I help him to finish it? Hmmmm.... who was the one who did not allow me to do it because he deems me not a lawyer, so the job is above me? And now that he has no time to do it, he throws it back at me? And I daresay, if I had been tracking the agreements in the first place, I would have extracted all the information and completed the entire thing long ago!

He is not like other bosses I have worked with before, who picked on every little single thing and made personal attacks. He has not said anything nasty to me. But we (the colleagues in the same department and I) feel uncomfortable about his management style, because we seriously have no idea what he has been doing all these while after joining the company. I much prefer to work for someone who actually get things done rather than just talking so much and in the end never got anything done.

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