How can I navigate a team where I am excluded from important meetings and decision-making processes, despite my seniority and recent promotion?

Question

Despite my seniority and recent promotion, I am being excluded from important meetings in favor of a younger employee who is a yes man and close to the engineering manager (EM). This employee, with less experience than me, has significant influence over the EM and is always considered first. This situation is disturbing, especially since our lean team has a Slack channel named product_name_planning_committee, which includes only the EM, tech lead, this employee, and two other product and business people, excluding me.

Though I am part of a common Slack chat with the tech lead, EM, and this individual, it is mainly for update requests from the EM. I fear my role may be at risk due to my introverted nature, despite my skills. I worry that my reportees will be reassigned, and I may be laid off. I've considered quietly quitting and changing teams.

I’ve requested to be included in meetings to feel part of the decision-making process directly to the EM, but he has still not called me to any of the meetings and even today did one without me. The rest of the team no longer sees me as a lead. This exclusion has left me feeling depressed and anxious about being removed from my position. While I was previously involved and got promoted, my reduced communication has led to my exclusion.

I’ve decided to focus on maintaining my self-respect. I no longer work late nights and offer family health excuses when necessary. I used to handle multiple roles, including writing code for others, filling QA gaps, and developing SDKs in different languages, but I no longer feel part of the core team or the engineering leadership.

Despite being fed up and feeling left out, I believe my skills are relevant and beyond what the role requires. How can I effectively navigate this situation and ensure my contributions are recognized?

Alex Chiou · Accepted Answer

Argh, classic company politics...

With issues like these, it's important to realize that you always want to try to meet people halfway (i.e. you do something and your manager does something). You're already on good track to do this as you are self-aware about being too introverted, which isn't good for senior engineers (it's possible to be both introverted and outspoken, this is often misunderstood). This is from the promotion course, but the overall advice about being visible still stands: Sell Yourself, Claim Your Wins

On top of this, you have the classic fork in the road:

Do you trust your manager? - If you had a good relationship before, it's possible that your manager still has good intent, but you're just not doing enough to be recognized (being a manager is a hard job, and I have seen many good managers just sort of forget/not realize a report is struggling). In this case, you should have those awkward 1 on 1s and talk about this - Seems like a good first step is to get invited to those meetings and chats you're excluded from.
Do you not trust your manager? - In this, you should just leave. I'm glad you're strongly protecting your work-life balance: That's a great initial step if you decide to take this route.

For this fork, that's a call you need to make, largely on gut feel. It's hard for me to give a hard recommendation without observing you and your manager directly.

Best of luck!

How can I navigate a team where I am excluded from important meetings and decision-making processes, despite my seniority and recent promotion?

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