Help me persuade my boss to let me present at next away day

[Lesleyknopeswaffleiron]

I work for a small charity, in a (theoretically) fairly senior role, but my relationship with my boss is tricky for a couple of reasons. The upshot is that, while I have a good job title, I have very little autonomy in practice and it can be quite demoralising.

The work is busy, bordering on impossible, and we’re really understaffed, which means I’m often balancing the strategic work with really hands-on practical stuff that I was doing 10 years ago. I don’t have too much of a problem with that and enjoy the variety, but it’s hard to balance and there’s a lot.

My boss is miserable, and makes being around her pretty miserable too. She is clearly unhappy and so is angry, snappy and never ever gives positive feedback. She’s been actively unpleasant to some people in the team, though not to me. (Well, only once, but it’s possible I was over sensitive that day. My point is that she’s tricky). This comes from a protective place: she’s trying to push back on us having more work to do because we are so stretched, but the impact doesn’t always match the intention. Our whole department is seen as unhelpful and miserable and whingy.

I’m also stagnating and not getting any professional development. They are strapped for cash so I had to cancel my professional membership, and I don’t get to go to conferences or anything.

After Christmas, I was ill and fed up, so I applied for a new job. Didn’t get it, and one of the reasons is that I got all flustered in the interview and made a tit out of myself. Deeply embarrassed about it now. I’m not a strong public speaker, I haven’t had much practice and something happens to me in the moment and I freeze and make a tit out of myself. My boss doesn’t know this.

We have quarterly all-hands away days. Last quarter, I wanted to speak at the away day about my area of expertise, to help staff understand what my team did and to repair some of the damage. Boss said no, reasonably, because it wasn’t the right time as they needed the time for something else. She suggested it go on the agenda for the next one.

That’s coming up now, and I want to broach getting a short session on the agenda, both as a repair thing, and also a low-stakes professional development opportunity, to practice public speaking and up my confidence in this area.

I am 90% sure my boss will say no, that we’re too busy to be distracted by this sort of thing and we need to focus on the day to day. Which is true, but we really do have a repair job on our hands.

also her being miserable is making me miserable, and I just want to give it a go. Even if I was to lead a bloody icebreaker or something.

any tips for persuading her? All help much appreciated! (And thanks for making it to the end).

[Squiggles23]

She sounds difficult OP! Why don’t you say you set it as one of your goals for the year - you want to developing especially around presenting. If needed you could say you are happy to work on the presentation outside the core hours?

[Lesleyknopeswaffleiron]

Thank you @Squiggles23 - that’s a good idea, and we’re at the review stage so this would be a good time to do that.

She is difficult, but I also have a lot of empathy for her - she’s not wrong about the things that are wrong with our organisation, but it’s just like she’s totally broken and can’t/won’t see a way out of it. Whereas I am more hopeful that it can be fixed.