Hey everyone,
Wondering if anyone else has been in the same situation. I started at a smaller company ~6 months ago in a "strategy finance" role (capital planning, M&A, etc.). The finance team as a whole is pretty lean, and a few people left. Because of this, I was handed some side projects to pick up the slack, but over the past couple of months it's snowballed and now the majority of my work is very different from my original job description/what I want to do in my career. I'm fine to help plug some holes in the short term, but the changes feel pretty permanent.
Has anyone else been in a similar situation to this? Curious to hear how you guys have handled it and the discussion with the higher ups.
Update
I had a talk with the group head about projects going on right now, things coming up in the next couple of weeks, etc., and brought up all of the admin work. Basically laid it out to say "I'm happy to help in the short term cover some gaps, but I was hired to do xyz and that's where I want to grow my career - I don't want to lose sight of that." He agreed that I shouldn't be doing these admin tasks, and set out a plan to transition those projects to the right people.
Thanks everyone for weighing in
what's the background story - change in management, business reorg, bad results due to customer loss or disruption in the industry?
What sort of tasks do you do now? Are they purely ad hoc? Do you still do some of your previous work? Is it at all possible that your previous work was below par and they have lost trust?
I would definitely bring this up with a senior to discuss your job role / type of work. If you are very unsatisfied I would seriously consider looking for someone else if your senior gives the indication that this is a permanent thing.
They aren't going to realize there's an issue unless you talk to them. There's nothing wrong with wanting to make sure you don't lose sight of your core competencies and desired areas of focus. If you've had a lot of turnover everyone is probably just trying to make it through, make sure you remind them of how you bring value and see if there is a way to bring someone else in to fill the gaps.
before everybody jumps the gun and tells him to talk to management under the pretense that he's dissatisfied with his work, we need to know the background story.
example - company is doing poorly...very strong likelihood it will not allocated capex to M&A (for which he was hired). so instead of laying him off, they're finding other work/projects to do so they can retain him. this context paints a different story. imagine if you're management who's doing what they can to keep this kid around while you right the ship, then he comes in guns blazing wondering why he's not doing m&A?
He should never come in guns blazing EVER. Even if things are going gangbusters and they have cash up the wazoo and he isn't being assigned to M&A tasks.
I'd still advocate for talking to them because then OP can get a perspective into why he's being tasked with what he's doing. A respectful conversation shares knowledge both ways.
Thanks for weighing in guys. To give some more background, I'm now staffed on a ton of accounting and admin work that takes a big chunk of my day - reconciling journal entries, bank account maintenance, helping AR/AP track down receivables, etc. I get that it's a small company and there would be some stretching up and down from my position, but it's gotten a little out of hand. I still get looped in on bits and pieces of old projects, but it's pretty clear different people are running them.
I'm pretty confident it's not performance related, since I received a lot of good feedback when I was aligned with the strategy side of things. The business itself is doing well, so that's not the cause. I think all of this came from a mix of people leaving (both the company and internally to other teams), and new management coming in during all of this. New management was probably just trying to keep everything moving smoothly, and I got slowly knocked off course with one-off requests building up.
The new group head is a pretty reasonable guy, and I think he would understand my frustration. I don't think brining it up to his attention how far off course everything has gotten would be an issue.
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