Empire Building

We built up empires. We stole countries. That's how you build an empire. We stole countries with the cunning use of flags. Yeah, just sail around the world and stick a flag in. -Eddie Izzard, Dress To Kill (1998)

The two teams came together under Il Duce 's leadership, but they didn't really combine. He promoted one of the European managers to be my new counterpart (we'll call this guy Renfield) when Il Duce, himself, moved up. Renfield and I continued to run our own two teams under Il Duce's instructions.

Il Duce is an empire builder. He looks for ways to expand his own job to show people that he is ready for career advancement. It has worked well for him. He has advanced. For example: to get his new title as the global Director, he applied for a different position that Augustus had posted to lead a completely new team and then convinced him that this new team should fall under the same umbrella as his old team and that he could lead both. (Augustus, poor fool, should have asked for a few other opinions before agreeing to that deal.) Sadly, the new team that Il Duce and Augustus formed was quickly taken away and reassigned to a different department, and Il Duce was left only managing me and Renfield, begging the question(s) of what had he really done to deserve his promotion in the first place and why was he still a global Director?

However, being an empire builder (ironic that he's British) he quickly moved on to new ventures. A year into his reign, he was ready to spin off a whole new team under his global directorship which would focus on our company's Business Intelligence. (Often a contradiction in terms, this is fancy industry-speak for giving your company's executives all the data they need, at their fingertips, to make quick strategy decisions. It's a fine idea, if you can pull it off, which, in a company as spread out and incongruous as mine, and with as much data to sift through as we have, is very difficult.)

So he split the team, which previously did nothing but handle database administration, into two groups. He had 22 people at this point. He took 4 of them over to this Business Intelligence Team, making Renfield the head of that team, leaving me with the remaining 18 staff for database administration. I told him that if he was going to double my responsibility he needed to promote me at the same time. He replied that it was not possible to promote me to the level of Director when he, himself, was a Director (something I later found out was completely inaccurate), that maybe he would consider it if-and-when he got promoted to a Senior Director, and hinted that if I didn't take the job "as is" he would find someone else to do it.

Rock and a hard place? Yeah. I took the job with bittersweet feelings about it. On the one hand, I was excited that my responsibility doubled from just managing the North American crew to now managing a global team, but on the other hand, I was disappointed that I didn't get a promotion or a single extra penny for it.

Furthermore, when he had stripped away four people to build his new team, he was not able to replace them, so we were asked to do the same amount of work with fewer people. At about the same time, one of my new staff members on the European team quit (courtesy of Il Duce's high turn-over style of management), bringing our number down to 17 (from 22).

My team was struggling.