How I changed jobs (Part 1)

I've been meaning to chronicle my career shift, if only for my own satisfaction and due to the fact that the way it occurred was so mind bogglingly infuriating that I cannot quite believe it to this day. So I figured I'd jot down what happened and leave people free to make up their own minds about what happened.

Bit of back story I suppose. My last role was that of an Appointee Officer for a company that shall remain nameless. What this means in real terms was that I was the second in command of a small team (varying from 5-7 people depending on people leaving etc) that was tasked with managing the personal finances of vulnerable clients. This meant we looked after money for elderly people with no relatives, people with physical injuries and those with learning difficulties. We would look after every aspect of their finances, from receiving their benefit payments, paying bills, providing money for shopping right the way through to booking them holidays and so on. A pretty in depth job but one that was also equal parts interesting and frustrating. You would not believe how many family members are prepared to rip off their own relatives - but I digress.

I'd been working at said place for six years and doing pretty well at it. My old manager had gone through a bit of a rough patch personally speaking and it was fair to say that I had taken on more and more responsibility, without anything in the way of reward. Eventually a new managing director was put in place and he seemed to take an instant dislike to our team and insisted on putting in place a series of regimented procedures that made our jobs that much harder. Which is not to say that some of them were not necessary as it makes sense for a company dealing with the finances of 400+ vulnerable people to have accountability, however, he basically implemented things in as roughshod a manner as he could while offering the team no chance for new personnel, training or even overtime to battle the workload.

After about a year of his constant questioning of how we did things my manager basically said enough was enough and resigned, without even having another job lined up which should tell you something. I was equal parts worried about the direction of the team and excited about the prospect of finally moving up the ranks (I'd been there four years at this point).

However, at the interviews it became rapidly apparent that I was going to be basically overlooked due to the fact I'd worked closely with the previous manager. How could I improve the team, they said, if I hadn't been able to do so under my old boss? Um, maybe because she was the person in charge and I couldn't force her to change the way the team was run? Anyway, cut a long story short, they hired someone external to the company that had zero experience in terms of being an appointee, interacting with social services, handling benefits etc. I found that especially interesting as part of the interview had been to do a presentation on the state of the appointee department and ways it could be improved - a presentation no one else could surely have delivered if they had no reasonable experience (bearing in mind that, from a legal standpoint, the interviewees should all be treated fairly and the same). She did have some management experience, but the overall message I got was that she was hired for basically NOT being me. Lucky for her.

So instead of being the manager I was now working for a manager who had no clue about anything we currently did or any of the procedures we had in place. The fact she had also been instructed to raise the teams profitability at any cost, seemingly, would come into play too. I can't say I was too upset about not getting the job, at least not at first, more with the way the interviews had been carried out in a completely biased way. Cest la vie!

Our new manager was, at least, the sociable type and made every effort to get on with the team and try to pick up what it was exactly that we did. Due to senior management allowing the former manager a handover period of exactly one day (I kid you not) she basically had no chance of passing everything to the new boss, so it was only a matter of time before things went to pot.

Over the course of the next year or so things gradually began to disintegrate. Tasks that used to be standard fare for the team gradually became more and more overlooked. Filing was not getting done, bank statements were not being checked, bills were going unpaid or being paid from the wrong clients account entirely. The reasons for this were many and various. A team member left to go to a new good and was not adequately replaced, another had a serious long term illness and was absent for a prolonged period and no one who subsequently joined the team was adequately trained.

The main problem was one of the staff, a girl that had become good friends with the new manager. She would constantly make basic errors on a variety of tasks. Including paying cheques from the wrong persons account, not logging payments at all so the company was liable, or agreeing to phone requests for money and purchase etc but then not noting them down anywhere leading to a number of complaints. It didn't help that she would lie about completing work only for unfinished documents to turn up on her desk after we had received a phone call complaining about us not doing this or that. Not only that but she was constantly late to work - arriving late on over 30+ separate occasions in one four month period. Any one of the countless errors she made should have been grounds for some kind of disciplinary procedure. Instead, because of her friendship with the team manager, the issues were overlooked time and time again. I made at least four separate formal complaints about her in the last year of my employment there, and all of them were ignored. It got to the point where other members of the team would not pass her work because they feared it would simply not get done.

Finally, at the start of this year I had simply had enough. I sent a lengthy email, detailing all of the issues caused by this particular colleague, to the current managing director (a different fellow to the one that had done the appointee management interviews - who had himself been made redundant on a technicality). He invited me to a meeting to discuss the problem and go over possible solutions. I discussed the possibility of her being retrained, though raised the issue that such action had been tried before and she refused to change her attitude, he suggested replacing her entirely and I said that may well be the only option. He said he would have to discuss the problem with my manager, as she would have to have a say, and then we could proceed.

Three weeks later, and having heard nothing from the director in the interim, my manager summoned me to the boardroom downstairs (along with another colleague) and promptly said I was suspended.

Then things got really interesting........