Business announcement

A new meeting appears on my work calendar, called "short business announcement", hosted by the CEO and with everybody invited. These always make me uneasy, because while the CEO is a nice guy, big business announcements are rarely good news for the little people. They almost always bring change, and change often means redundancies.

Then again, it really is a short meeting, only fifteen minutes. If it was something that big, it would be longer. I try to think of what else it could be. There's a certain contradiction in it being short (and therefore seemingly not that important) and yet it also requiring the CEO to speak to the whole business. Maybe someone important is leaving or changing roles and there'll be a little speech about it?

Seems unlikely that it would be the CEO himself, announcing his own impending departure. My mind wanders to the next most important and senior person I can think of, our department manager, and I briefly recoil in horror at the thought of him leaving, because he's great. Nah, I think to myself, if he was leaving he wouldn't just let the CEO drop that bombshell on us out of nowhere. He'd tell his team beforehand.

At that moment, I overhear two people who report directly to the department manager talking about how he just put another meeting in their calendars. I check what it is and it's hosted by the department manager, just before the big announcement, and called a "quick catch-up". I feel almost physically ill in that moment. That is it! He's telling them personally that he's leaving just before the CEO announces it to everyone! I hate it but the shoe fits too perfectly.

I exchange DMs with a colleague to vent my fears and she tells me that she was similarly worried, but that she actually spoke to the department manager earlier that day and he'd told her that the meeting and business announcement were "nothing to worry about". I wonder whether he's so humble that he'd consider his own departure no big deal, but my colleague at least seems quite reassured so I take her word for it.

The appointed hour comes and... it's an announcement that for the second time in less than five years, we're cancelling a big re-platforming project to start over with a different direction. This isn't exactly good news, but I struggle to not wear a goofy grin of relief. I'm invited to a short FAQ session afterwards and the colleague who beckons me to come gives me a bit of a weird look when I tell her that I'm fine and have no questions. Maybe I made them think that I'm annoyed or don't care, but I was just happy that it didn't turn out to be what I feared. You can throw a lot at me as long as I get to keep my people.