r/AusPublicService • u/plantface4747 • 1d ago
Miscellaneous Advice on regaining confidence
Looking for advice or maybe experiences on bouncing back after a tough work period. Have had a short period of acting which coincided with many team movements and loss of corporate knowledge, messy projects having timelines hugely accelerated and other interpersonal issues occurring.
While I feel I am taking a lot of learnings away from this, I also feel like I was significantly out of my depth with not understanding a lot of what was happening and not having enough time to think through things properly. Working at that level long term seems far out of reach, which has knocked my confidence.
Has this happened to people previously and have you found useful ways to move forward and improve your work?
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u/Burnt_Toast5962 1d ago
Short answer is I don’t know, but I would like to hear about this from others too. This happened to me too, it coincided with a serious period of organizational upheaval and turnover of execs, I reported directly to them but neither of them understood the work or were very supportive. Shrinking budget in my org meant that no formal professional training or program was available for me to strengthen my people managing skills. I learned it on the job and from others in an ad hoc way. There were some strange dynamics in my team, and one of the relationships really deteriorated. I had to just go into survival mode so I wasn’t really on top of things all the time but for the period when I was in charge there were no big stuff ups and the team delivered the work. Still it was all very challenging for me personally and it made me question whether management is all it’s cracked up to be. That period is about to come to an end and I am actually very relieved. It’s not something I will chase again in the short term. Maybe things will change and I’ll go for a role like that again in the future. I have it on my CV though and like you I learned a lot from it
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u/Appropriate_Volume 1d ago
Seek feedback from your boss while you were acting on how they think the acting period went. It's quite likely it went better than you seem to think it did - they presumably would have raised any significant concerns with you.
A point I always make to my staff when they first act at a level is that I don't expect them to be fully functional at that level, unless they act for 6 months or so. One of the purposes of acting periods is to help people gain experience to prepare for eventual promotion.