Oh once I dwelt in my comfort zone

I didn’t think outside the square.

I pushed not at the envelope

I wasn’t getting anywhere.

The goal-posts had moved, I’d lost the plot

The playing-field wasn’t level.

I read not from the same songsheet

It was the very devil.

I put nothing into the pipeline

I was prone to siloed thinking

Holistic synergies eluded me

My focus it was blinking.

My commitment was less than 100 per cent

I stared at the glass ceiling

Oh who but a human resources consultant

Could know what I was feeling?

I had not enough bandwidth the challenge to meet

I was not incentivised

My passion for the product

Had vanished before my eyes. 

So the team leader gave me a heads-up

(First offering a box of tissues)

‘Weep not, we’ll address your performance shortfall

Across a broad range of issues.

‘We’ll conference, we’ll mentor, we’ll feedback as well

We’ll have a look under the bonnet

We’ll workshop, develop an overview –

Your case, you see, I am on it.

‘You must drill down, loop back, touch base and engage

With relevant key stakeholders

And if you need any more of these handy buzzwords,

You’ll find plenty right here in these folders!’

I left that heads-up with a gladdened heart

For management it had spoken

And uttered those words I had so longed to hear:

‘My door, it is always open.’

So I picked myself up and ran the hard yards

And did some quite heavy lifting

I utilised innovative granular modules –

The paradigm, it was shifting.

Before long I had leveraged a core upgrade

In my skills both off and online

And soon I achieve the desired outcomes

And reverse engineered my decline.

I bathed in cascades of thought showers by day

Brainstorming replaced heavy drinking

I adopted a cradle-to-grave approach

And 360 degree thinking. 

I’m on the same page now, my life is enhanced

Broadly speaking, I wear a nice suit

And down the track at the end of the day 

I grabbed that low-hanging fruit.