Yeah, about five years into my job, my manager at the time came to me and said they were thinking about giving me a team so they could show management I was ready to be promoted. I asked her how many and she said, "Oh, 3 or 4. I don't want to stress you."
"Lori, I was pushing 3-4 people around 12 years ago* in the Army. If you're worried that'll stress me, then please do not consider me for the job. I've been management (aka senior NCO) and I don't like it. I don't like paperwork and I don't like useless meetings. I like tech writing/editing." That's when I told her about my time as the Operations Sergeant with 84 people. "Honestly, I think being asked to lead 3-4 people would be a big step backward for me."
"Oh. So, how's the tech writing going?"
"Great."
"Good to hear. Any suggestions for who might be good at this team lead slot?"
*12 years before that conversation I was a Specialist serving as a squad leader. My first squad as a Sergeant was 23 kids right out of Basic Training . . now that was an experience to say the least. Eventually, they assigned half of them to another Sergeant which did NOT make me cry.
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Originally Posted by GloryDayz
I'll be honest, I had staff members who were exactly like you and they were some of the most productive and easy people to have on staff. I was in network engineering so it was actually very nice having staff who just wanted to engineer and/or troubleshoot networking issues, but weren't jockeying for the next supervisory job. So my hats off to you for being the dude who made it clear that you were happy where you were and got on to talking football.
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