Telecommut
Twice is possibly a blip.
Three times or more? That’s a pattern. And patterns don’t fix themselves just because the postcode changes.
I say this as someone who had to learn it the hard way. More than once. Which is, if nothing else, consistent.
What is the noise hiding from you? Photo by Erik Mclean on Unsplash
The manager problem that kept finding me
I’ve written in this series about the managers who made things difficult. The nit-picking. The constantly shifting focus. The endless requests for more detail, more back-up slides, more evidence for conclusions that seemed self-evident. The confidence that wasn’t there and couldn’t be extended to anyone else as a result.
What I haven’t written about yet is how many times a version of that happened before I understood that I was part of the equation.
Not because I was doing anything wrong. I want to be clear about that. The managers were genuinely difficult. The situations were genuinely hard. I’m not rewriting history to make myself the problem.
But I was showing up to those situations in a particular way. I was managing upward in a particular way – or not managing upward, which was also a choice. I was responding to uncertainty and instability in a particular way. And that particular way wasn’t serving me. It was making things harder, not easier.
I couldn’t see it at the time because I was too close to it. And because, if I’m honest, it was easier to see the manager as the problem than to ask what I was bringing to the dynamic that might be making it worse.
That’s not self-blame. That’s pattern recognition. And there’s an important difference between the two.
The Other Pattern I Had To See
The managers were one thing. But there was something else running alongside them that took me even longer to name.
I have a tendency to take on other people’s work.
Not because anyone forces me to. Because I can see it needs doing. Because leaving things undone feels uncomfortable in a way that doing them doesn’t. Because I am good at a lot of things and when something isn’t getting done I have the capability to step in and I often do.
And for a long time I told myself this was a strength. I’m reliable. I get things done. I don’t leave problems unresolved.
What I wasn’t seeing was what it was costing me. Or what it was communicating to the people around me.
When you consistently absorb other people’s work – when you cover for colleagues who aren’t delivering, take on responsibilities that aren’t yours, fill gaps that should be filled by someone else – you send a signal. The signal is: this is fine. This is manageable. There is no problem here.
And so the problem never gets fixed. Because from the outside, there isn’t one. You’ve made it invisible by absorbing it.
Meanwhile you’re carrying significantly more than your share. And when things get hard – when you need cover, when you need support, when you need someone to absorb something for you – it often isn’t there. Not because people are malicious. But because you’ve never asked for it. Because you’ve always managed. Because the expectation has become that you will continue to manage.
That is a pattern. I have lived it more than three times. Which means, by my own definition, it is definitively a pattern and not a blip.
Why patterns are so hard to see
Here’s the thing about a pattern you’re inside. It doesn’t feel like a pattern. It feels like a series of individual situations, each with its own specific features and its own specific causes.
This job was hard because of that manager. That role was difficult because of the team dynamic. This situation was a nightmare because of the workload. Each one feels separate. Each one has a reasonable explanation that doesn’t require you to look at what’s common across all of them.
And the explanations are usually true. The manager was difficult. The team dynamic was a problem. The workload was unreasonable. None of that is wrong.
But underneath all of those individual explanations, there is often something consistent. A way you respond to a certain type of situation. A dynamic you keep finding yourself in. A thing you keep doing or not doing that puts you in the same place over and over, regardless of the specific circumstances around you.
Seeing that thing – really seeing it, without defensiveness and without self-blame – is one of the most useful things you can do before you make your next career move.
Because if you don’t see it, you take it with you. And the new role, the new manager, the new organisation – eventually, the familiar feeling returns. Not because you’re doing anything wrong. Because you brought the pattern with you and the pattern is still running.
How To Start Seeing It
The first step is the most uncomfortable one. You have to be willing to look at your career history not just as a series of things that happened to you, but as a series of things you were also part of.
That doesn’t mean taking responsibility for other people’s behaviour. It means being honest about your own.
Look back across the roles that haven’t worked. Not just the most recent one – all of them. Ask yourself:
What was the common thread in what made them hard? Not the surface explanation – the thing underneath it.
Is there a type of situation I keep ending up in? A type of manager, a type of dynamic, a type of environment that keeps appearing in my story?
Is there something I consistently do – or consistently don’t do – that contributes to how things unfold?
Is there something I consistently fail to ask for, or consistently fail to name as a problem, until it’s already cost me significantly?
These are not comfortable questions. They require a level of honesty that is easier to avoid than to face. But the women I work with who have been willing to face them – who have looked clearly at their own patterns as well as the patterns of the environments they’ve been in – consistently make better next moves than the ones who didn’t.
Not because they blame themselves. But because they understand themselves. And understanding yourself is the most powerful tool you have when you’re deciding where to go next.
The pattern and the next move
Here’s what I want you to take from this.
If you’ve had more than two roles that didn’t work – for reasons that felt different each time but left you with a similar feeling – it’s worth asking whether there’s a pattern underneath the different explanations.
Not to punish yourself for it. Not to conclude that you’re the problem. But to understand what you’re carrying with you so you can make a conscious decision about whether you want to keep carrying it or whether it’s time to put it down.
Some patterns are about the types of environments you’ve been choosing – and the fix is getting clearer about what you actually need before you choose the next one.
Some patterns are about how you operate within environments – and the fix is understanding your own tendencies clearly enough to manage them differently.
And some patterns are about what you’ve been willing to tolerate – and the fix is deciding, clearly and finally, what you’re no longer willing to accept and building that into every decision you make from here.
The Engineering Career Clarity Guide is the starting point for all of this. It’s designed to help you look clearly at your own experience – not to extract a tidy narrative from it, but to understand what it’s actually telling you. About what you need. About what you’ve been tolerating. About the patterns that are worth keeping and the ones that are worth leaving behind.
[Download it here: Before You Update Your CV, Do This First]
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