I'm new to a senior marketing role, and I already have a folder of expectations I haven't met, most of them written by me.
There's the 30/60/90 day plan, which sounded reasonable when I wrote it and now reads like it was written by someone who assumed the phases would happen one at a time, not all three landing in the same week, every week. There's the team, part inherited, part still being recruited, all of it looking to me for a shape to work toward. There's the rest of the C-suite, watching for quick wins: something visible, something they can point to soon. There's the longer-term strategy underneath all of that, the actual reason I was hired, sitting in a document I open most days and rarely finish editing. And there's the business-as-usual work running the whole time regardless, which apparently also needs me to spot where it could run better, on top of everything else.
None of these things is unreasonable on its own. Recruiting takes the time it takes. Quick wins matter to people who need to justify a new hire's cost internally, quickly. A 90-day plan is meant to be ambitious. It's the arithmetic of all of it landing on the same desk in the same week that doesn't work, and somehow I keep being surprised that it doesn't.
What I notice most is the depth, or the lack of it. There was a version of this job (a version of me doing this job) that could sit with a problem and actually work it, rather than reach for the fastest defensible answer. Lately I'm spending fifteen minutes on something that used to get an afternoon, and then I move on, because the next thing is already waiting, and the thing after that is too. Or I'm skimming the surface of supporting my team: ten minutes here, ten minutes there, dropping in and dropping out again, instead of actually seeing something through with them. Some days I tell myself this is just what seniority looks like, trusting instinct over process, and that's fine. I mostly believe it.
Other days it feels like being caught, like those fifteen-minute calls and ten-minute check-ins are the real me finally showing through, years of getting away with something catching up all at once. Being new doesn't help. There's no track record here yet to fall back on, just a growing list of things I haven't gone deep enough on, and a suspicion that everyone around me is quietly adjusting what they expect.
What I think is actually true, and keep forgetting to believe, is that the shallowness isn't a discovery about my ability. It's the predictable output of how many surfaces I'm touching at once. Five things done at the same time don't leave room for depth on any of them; that's just how attention works, dividing itself down until each piece gets a sliver. Skimming, half-formed calls, a nagging sense you've missed something underneath: that's what shallow-everywhere feels like from the inside, whether you're good at your job or not.
The trap is mistaking the feeling for the diagnosis. The overwhelm is real. I'm not making that part up, and I don't think naming it away helps much. But the story I've been telling myself about what the overwhelm means (that it's evidence, that the imposter thing has finally caught up with me) doesn't hold up under much scrutiny at all. It's a workload problem wearing a competence costume, and I keep answering the costume, not what's underneath it.
I don't have a fix for the arithmetic yet: the plan still due, the team still being built, the quick wins still to be found somewhere. None of that goes away just because I've correctly diagnosed why it feels bad. But there's a difference between being stretched thin and being not enough, even on the days they produce the exact same Tuesday. I'd like to get better at telling which one I'm actually in, before I let the costume convince me it's the second.