To feel excluded at work and need advice?

[Celia24]

I work in a medium sized company and work across several teams I get along well with.

At my most recent 1 to 1s I told my boss that while I was fine with working on day to day maintenance work temporarily I wanted a new project to work on. This is important to my daily job satisfaction as well as important to my growth.

He told me project A and Project B we're coming in soon. He said he'd give project A to new colleague Anna and that he thought I'd be ideal for project B. I emphasised I was really keen to work on it.

Well Anna was given both projects! And in fact, everyone apart from me & another colleague are working on these. I have a long expensive commute to the office just to spend most of my time working alone while the rest of the team work together. I sometimes collaborate with other teams but otherwise I feel really lonely.

Now a new project has come up and again it looks like it will be given to Anna. Worse, my previous boss put me on the path to promotion but this boss keeps dangling the carrot.

If you were me, how would you handle this?

I also just want to emphasise I successfully delivered 3 projects back to back with no issues at all before this. It's been 6 months since I had a proper project to work on

Have you asked your manager why you didn't get project B?

No @Alycidon he cancelled our last 1 to 1 and has been on holiday. But we have our next 1 to 1 coming up this week so I need to broach it somehow.

I mean do I just flat out ask him why was it not given to me? I'm expecting a waffly response because I'm not sure what justification he can give to be honest.

If he's likely to waffle, being direct is probably the only way. The ship has sailed with project B so your objective should be making sure the next project is definitely given to you.

Ask him to be specific about what made you not the right fit for that project. Ask him what the next project is and what the requirements are, and get it all in writing. Ask him what his intentions are for your project based work for the next six months and get that written down too.

If he's recently into the job, and it's only recently that you've been experiencing this, it might come down to him being a poor manager, or him not liking you for some reason. Ultimately, a company that dangles the carrot of promotion without delivering it doesn't value you. It might be smart to cast your eye around the job market and see what else is out there.

Id be asking what do I need to do in order to get project C? If you don't get it then start looking for something else.

@katmarie he isn't a new manager. He's been there for many years. In fact a colleague told me he's part of the reason my predecessor left.

He isn't a bad guy, just sort of lazy and undervalues people. I get the impression he likes me well enough.

Ok I'll take your advice to get it in writing. The thing is I've been doing senior work without the renumeration and I'm not willing to keep that up. I've been given raises several times and great feedback on my work so I'm not sure why I'm suddenly not being treated like a safe pair of hands.