update: I’m the weakest link on my team

It’s a special “where are you now?” season at Ask a Manager and I’m running updates from people who had their letters here answered in the past.

Remember the letter-writer who worried they were the weakest link on their team? The first update was here, and here’s the latest.

I wrote to you last year about how unhappy I was to be the lowest performing person on my team. My job was killing my confidence and was making me miserable. I’m happy to report that things are very different now!

In December of 2024, I was notified that I was being laid off. I was given a month of employment to wrap up and a generous severance. It was honestly a blessing because it was like getting paid full-time to work on getting a better job. Before launching my job search in earnest, I spent a month improving my skills. I read books about best practices, worked on a side project, and even hired someone to mentor me. What a difference a little professional development made! I finally understood concepts that had always been fuzzy. I finally started to feel competent. In the new year, I took this confidence and started applying for jobs in my target area. I got some responses and was given technical assessments. Thanks in large part to the skilling-up I had done, I aced these, and was invited to move forward in the interview process for two roles. By January 16th, I had an offer! I took the job and even negotiated a higher salary.

In my new role, I was actually hired to be the resident expert in my background area. If you had told me that last October, I would have panicked and said that I couldn’t succeed in that. But here I am, doing fine! I’m not only following along successfully, I’m driving design and taking responsibility for a major piece of our project. My co-workers ask for my help with things they can’t solve and value my feedback on my their work.

I’ve tried to figure out what’s responsible for things going so differently. I think it helps that my new co-workers expect me to succeed. In my old role, no one had any confidence in me. But now people rely on my judgment and look to me as an example. That propels me to put forth the best work I can. I used to just try to get by, because that’s all I thought I was capable of. But now I always make sure I’m following best practices, because I’m setting the standard for the rest of my team.

It also helps that I’m now working in a new area that’s very well documented. There are whole books I can go to for guidance, whereas my old project was so proprietary that there was nowhere to go for help outside of my immediate coworkers. Whenever I’m figuring something out now, I can research it and make an informed decision. I’ve become much more skilled in the few months I’ve been working here because of all the reading I’ve done to support my work.

My job is not perfect, and I still have some of the same weaknesses I did in my old role. But overall it’s a world of difference. I feel like I’m a different person. If anyone reading this is unhappy in their job but afraid of looking for a new one, I hope you are lucky enough to be laid off like I was :)

The post update: I’m the weakest link on my team appeared first on Ask a Manager.