After the British loss at Yorktown, the government led by Lord North collapsed in a Parliamentary vote of no confidence. The sitting members of Parliament communicated to King George III that they no longer had faith in the Prime Minister to effectively set policy. In representative government, the mandate to lead comes, directly or indirectly, from the led. I’ve been thinking lately that it’s a pity we don’t see the application of no confidence motions in more places. If we learned anything from the unfortunate case of Lord North (and from Braveheart), it’s that men don’t follow titles. Sure, they’ll go along for a while – as long as things are going well or as long as they don’t have options. But the moment they lose confidence or when a better opportunity presents itself, their support for your mandate to lead will fade away like a mist. You’ll look around one day and find yourself alone with your bad decisions, resented for your presumption of unearned loyalty, and ultimately made as irrelevant as the rock the water in a stream simply flows around.
Tag Archives: career
All resonable offers…
I want to write about anything other than the same old topics. I’m feeling more an more like a broken record and that doesn’t make good blogging. Cathartic for me, yes. Good blogging, no. Now and then I seem to hit these obsessive points (big surprise, right?) when everything I do and think about is focused like a laser on one thing, one goal. Focus is a good thing. Pouring endlessly over job announcements, making daily happy to glad changes to the ol’ resume, and preemptive house hunting only get you so far and seem to be a leading cause of sleep deprivation and stomach churn. That kind of focus feels, at least at the moment, less than good. The real problem of putting maximum effort into chasing one thing is that it doesn’t leave much time, inclination or energy for doing anything else. That seems to be the tradeoff. At some point the law of large numbers has to kick one in for the score, right? I’m ready to get to whatever’s next and all reasonable offers will be considered.
In the movies…
As a kid, I loved old movies… Westerns, war movies, dramas… I ate them up. That probably had something to do with spending almost every Sunday afternoon at my grandparent’s house, where the Sunday afternoon nap and movie were a staple of the week. That’s how I remember it at least. Some of my favorite movies were the 50s vintage comedies set during World War II. In fact they’re still some of my favorites – guaranteed to stop my channel surfing in its tracks every time.
Mr. Roberts is the story of a blowhard skipper commanding an unimportant supply ship at the far end of the Pacific war. Actually, it’s the story of the malcontent first officer and long-suffering crew of this unimportant supply ship at the far end of the Pacific war and the hijinks that ensue when they conspire to make life aboard ship a little less onerous despite the captain’s best efforts to make them all miserable. The main subplot revolves around Mr. Roberts ongoing effort to get a transfer and “get into the war” before the fighting is over. In the end, and with the help of crew, Roberts gets his transfer only to be killed by a kamikaze while fixing a cup of coffee. Make of that what you will.
A guy could learn alot about leadership and psychology from Mr. Roberts – from the skipper who values his bucket-planted palm tree above all other things, to the exec who finds in necessary to occasionally bend the rules, to the junior officer who rises to the challenge of telling truth to power, and the dangers of getting what you want most. There’s a message there somewhere in that 55 year old bit of cinematography.
I’ve been thinking alot about Mr. Roberts lately. In fact, some days I’d almost swear I was in the movie. If only the old man had a palm tree…
Closing time…
I think it’s safe to say that I’m serious about being ready to move on to the next job, but in the same breath, I’m probably more concerned about geography than I am by pay at this point. That’s been a bit of an interesting point of self discovery I made over the last year or two. If the desire for more money was the driving factor that brought me to Memphis, it’s the desire for the right geography that has sent me out on the search for the next great thing and, surprisingly for me at least, pay has taken a back seat this time around. That’s not to say that I wouldn’t consider something out beyond MD-VA-DC, but it would call for a pretty exceptional set of circumstances.
The job announcement for the first of two jobs I’m applying for in Cumberland closes in a few hours. In the parlance of the federal job seeker, that basically means that at some point in the next few weeks someone in an HR department is going to put together a “best qualified” list and send it along to whoever is doing the hiring. Then the person doing the hiring will take a week or two to rack and stack the list and make a decision about who gets an interview and who doesn’t. And then someone will take another week to schedule interviews. After the interviews, hopefully, there will be a decision made about which of the applicants to select and then the name of the selectee will be sent back to HR to make a formal offer. At any point up until the offer is made by HR, the entire process can be cancelled for almost any reason. That’s a roundabout way of saying that closing time is really just the beginning and as an applicant, it’s the only time in the process when you know there’s a hard and fast date when something is going to happen. After closing time, it’s all about waiting, and wondering, and playing what if, especially if your resume is deemed “good enough” to make the first cut and be sent to the person doing the hiring.
Waiting for things to happen, as we all know, isn’t my strong point. But it’s what I’m going to do. While I doing my level best to keep my head down. And avoid any unnecessary contact between me those who seem bent on driving me round the bend at every possibly opportunity… But I digress. Or more precisely, I wait – and you wait with me. Part of me wonders if I should be blogging this at all. Will you still respect me in the morning if I can’t figure out a way to make this happen? In a blog that focuses largely on what has annoyed me on any given day, this whole discussion feels a little extra personal, I guess. The only promise I’ve ever made here is to always write about whatever happens to be in my head… and as you can see, this is occupying alot of time on the old brainpan these days.
As much as I want to be hopeful that this will come together, I’m trying to mentally prepare and protect myself from how much I’ll hate it if this gets jacked up at the last minute… or if it doesn’t even make it to the last minute. As much as I’m trying not to let myself go down the road of “what if” it’s proving to be more of a challenge than I anticipated. Even after ten years on the road and half a dozen cities, I guess it’s easy to see yourself home when the opportunity is tantalizingly close.
And the plot thickens…
If pondering a voluntary reduction in grade in order to make an escape plan work might be described as an academic exercise, finding a position that would allow you to laterally transfer to the desired geographic location without loss of grade or pay could be described as mana from heaven. Of course the gulf between finding and actually being hired for said job is something akin to believing there’s a Loch Ness Monster and actually catching it with a fly rod. Sure, it’s theoretically possible, but pretty damned unlikely.
I know I’m beyond qualified, but I also know that doesn’t necessarily mean much in the selection process. And as much as I like to think I should be able to walk into this as a gimmie, I feel like I’m in the fight of my life… for a job I didn’t even know I wanted until I saw it announced. The kicker now is to try not getting too invested in the process; to treat it like any other resume I’ve got floating around out there. It’s easy to walk away from most notices that “you were not referred because you were not among the most qualified applicants.” Like it or not, I’m invested in this one and missing out on it would be a heartbreaker.
So now we wait…
How you know it’s that bad…
One of the worst kept secrets around is that I’m ready to move on. Other than to a few close friends and family I’ve never said it outright, but I suspect it’s more than obvious to anyone paying any attention at all. Memphis was never a place I planned on staying for a great length of time, but having the happy luck to fall in with a good team and a collapsing housing market made my three-and-out plan all but unworkable. I’d mostly made my peace with that. Or at least I thought I had.
The last year has proven to be more challenging professionally than I ever expected. And I’m not using “challenging” here in any of its quasi-positive connotation. The truth is, the last year has mostly sucked, but I didn’t know exactly how much it sucked until this morning when I found a federal job announcement in my career field for a position near my home town. I seriously considered it for way, way longer than I should have if my head were in the right place. I say that because although geographically desirable (to me at least), the job would have been a two-grade demotion, loss of $15,000 a year in pay, and I’d have to pay to get myself and all my stuff from here to there.
But I still though long and hard about it. And not in that wistful Norman Rockwell way. I’m talking about in that running financials and contemplating living in your parent’s basement for a year or two kind of way. You know it’s bad when voluntarily living in the basement to get away from what you’re doing now and for less money doesn’t seem all that bad by comparison. Yeah, I know I should be thankful to have a job and intellectually, I am. Emotionally, though, I’m spent… and it’s showing.
If anyone in Western Maryland sees me working weekends to make extra scratch in a couple of weeks, at least they’ll know why.
Lord of the Slides…
There are few things as terrible as showing you have more than a passing competence and even the most marginally technological task. Once you have crossed that boarder between the digital world and the one that exists only on paper, you have doomed yourself to endless days of PowerPoint. Create, review, edit, review, edit, review, edit, review, publish. It will drive the tempo of your day and haunt your dreams in the darkness. It is the very beating heart of what is wrong with us.
No matter how good you are, no matter how skilled you are at filling the white spaces, by the time you distill a complex idea into three or five bullets (it’s always an odd number, by the way. An even number of bullets looks awkward on the page), you’ve eliminated its identity as a complex idea. Now it’s just two syllable words on a screen dumbed down to the point where even the slowest guy in the room can draw some conclusions. It’s perhaps the most depressing bit of technological innovation ever.
Just the thought of the three slide sets sitting on my desk right now waiting to get punched up almost makes me physically ill. The lesson here is to shoot for mediocrity. Do too much and no one ever leaves you alone. Do too little and you’ll be the first of the dead wood to fall. Find that sweet spot in the middle and you can ride out a career with as few problems as possible. And for God’s sake, whatever you do, never under any circumstances let anyone know you can build an awesome deck of PowerPoint slides.
Finally…
My four-month odyssey to move from one end of the building to another seems to be complete this week. I say seems, of course, because every advance on this front has been beaten back up till this point. Now, finally, with all my workly possessions moved into my new digs, taking marching orders from my new boss, and only occasional questions from the old, I dare to hope this could be the real deal. I forgot what it was like not to be continually surrounded by procedural dysfunction. I haven’t wanted to beat anyone to death with their own arms for at least three days… and that might just be a personal best.
Just when I thought I was out…
So, it’s been no secret that I’ve been trying to get set up in my new job for the better part of the last three months. Management, circumstances, and just pure dumb luck have all conspired against me at various points and now, in a personal affront, nature (that bitch) has decided to throw her hat in the ring… Every tried to leave a job in emergency management during a natural disaster? Yeah… good luck with that.
Anyone out there need an exceptionally well-qualified logistician or need a campaign plan written for taking out those damned pesky neighbors? I’m totally on the market.
Deliverance…
My voice has been heard calling out from the wilderness and I have been delivered! Unending thanks to an old friend who with the simple word “tomorrow” has granted a reprieve from two months of delaying tactics which others were too timid to protest. With that, I conclude my short career as an emergency manager. I still love the work, but find that continuing to work under a regime willing to exploit my talents while at the same time being told that I was not yet ready for greater authority was simply intolerable.
I’m just glad this version of deliverance doesn’t have a scary banjo-playing kid.
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