Tag Archives: leadership

For my next trick…

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We all know I like to write. You don’t blog for seven years and publish a book if you’re adverse to putting words on paper. Writing is the best sub-minimum wage job I’ve ever had and it more than makes a run at what I’d do full time if I didn’t have pesky concerns like rent and groceries. For all practical purposes that’s a complete pipe dream, but it’s a happy pipe dream at least.

Since I took on the bureaucracy in my debut effort, the question I’ve been struggling with for the last month or so is what comes next. I’m toying with giving my short-lived teaching career the same treatment. I think there’s enough distance between me and that aborted attempt at a career that it could be fun. I worry that two and a half years over a decade ago might not give me quite as much source material as I’d like to have. I wasn’t as good at keeping notes of all the stupid things that happened back then as I am today.

Another option I’ve been kicking around is taking on the whole concept of leadership and management. God knows my brief tenure as a manager left me with enough material to at least get started on something interesting. Plus there’s the whole parade of good and terrible bosses that you encounter over the course of any career. That’s a rich mine of ideas right there, though I’m not entirely sure I want to stick with the business and career genre for another round.

Then there’s fiction. Maybe everyone who writes thinks they have the great American novel in them somewhere. I’m not sure I even have a proto-idea of what that might look like, but fiction is something I’d love to tinker with eventually… but I’d rather start out with the ghost of an idea rather than just a blank sheet of paper.

What’s the point? Yet another thing I don’t know. Something’s going to be next, but what’s that is just hasn’t occurred to me yet.

Redefining irony…

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Most mornings I’m greeted at the office with more than a handful of emails. Usually they’re run of the mill mass notifications that come in overnight, but just occasionally they’re something a little more than that. Like this morning, when the two messages at the top of my inbox were one providing more information on the impending furlough of federal employees and the other inviting me to take an employee satisfaction survey. It’s hard to find a better definition of irony than landing those two topics next to one another.

Let me be real honest here for a minute… no matter how much I may like my job, the people I work with, or how well the building is heated and cooled, when you tell me you’ll be cutting my pay by 20% for the remainder of the year, my employee satisfaction plummets into negative numbers. No amount of ample parking, health fairs, and access to a gym is going to compensate for that. Sorry. There’s being a team player, and then there’s getting screwed with your pants on… and I’ve been around long enough to know the difference when I see it.

In a republic, one makes his displeasure known by registering an opinion with their elected “leaders,” and yes I use that term loosely. Having expressed by disgust to the head of the executive branch, the legislative branch leadership team, and to my own elected representatives, all that’s really left is to register my profound discontent here in my very own marketplace of ideas. Honestly, stoking the fire here is probably more productive than anything I’ve bothered to send to our political masters anyway. At least here, I know someone is going to actually going to get around to reading what ends up on the page… and as a special bonus, I won’t get a form letter in response.

The hardest part…

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With much respect for Tom Petty, I have to tell you that I don’t necessarily agree with his conclusion that the waiting is the hardest part. As far as I can tell from personal experience, it’s the writing that regularly threatens to knock your teeth down your throat and beat you into a bloody pulp of submission… But hey, maybe that’s just my perspective.

PressDoing a day’s work with your brain is exhausting. It’s naturally a different kind of exhausting than baling hay or digging a ditch, but it’s still an activity that will leave you mentally spent at the end of the day. Normally, I’d recommend making sure to take the time to mentally recharge, rest, recreate, and relax, but when you’re in sight of the end, the only thing your exhausted brain wants to do is keep pushing ahead. Even with your eyes glazed over, your brain wants to drag you across the finish line. Or at least across the first of several finish lines you need to get past.

I realize the last two paragraphs probably read like gibberish. In this one instance, I’m going to be OK with that. You see, I’m two chapters away from being able to call what I’ve been madly typing away at for months a First Draft instead of just another Work in Progress. Trust me, that’s an important distinction if only to the guy behind the keyboard. It means that in maybe a week or two the first draft will get its first full length read through, polishing will start, and then it will make its way to several people who have graciously agreed to read a first draft that’s sure to be full of grammar, punctuation, usage, style, and myriad other problems. Then it’s more polishing, revision, cover design, formatting for e-publication, polishing, developing sales descriptions, publication, figuring out how to leverage jeffreytharp.com to sell ebooks on Amazon and Barnes & Noble, and trying to wrap my head around whether it’s worth putting a book of snarky observations into a dead tree edition.

Two thousand or so words now stand between me and where I want to be. This isn’t the end. It’s not even the beginning of the end… but it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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What Annoys Jeff this Week?

It hasn’t been an awful week. Tomorrow is Friday and I’m looking forward to an outstanding three day weekend and even better company. So there’s your silver cloud, now it’s time for the lead lining:

1. Command Decisions. Maybe I shouldn’t complain about the sheet of ice that covered the parking lots and roads at work this morning. The nuckleheads who piled up or ran down into a ravine trying to get to the gate are the ones who have a real gripe. Since all I did was twist the hell out of my back trying to keep my footing when I got out of the truck, I guess I got off easy. Since I didn’t have any trouble on the county roads getting to work, this might just be a case of the better part of valor being the powers that be saying “yeah, we didn’t get a head start on this one, go ahead and delay arrival by an hour.” By then that fine coating of ice would have been melted and a whole lot of property damage and more than a few personal injuries could have been avoided. Seems like it would have been a no brainer.

2. Books. Now that every DVD and CD I own are safely stored and backed up to disk, I’m starting to eye the one last bastion of physical media in the house… The bookshelves that take up an entire wall of my home office. They’re stacked to overflowing with dead tree editions of every book I’ve read over the last 20-odd years. A handful of them, certainly under a hundred titles, have some significant meaning to me and I’d keep the paper copy regardless. For the rest, though, it would be awfully nice to file them away as an ebook to have on hand “just in case” I ever need some factoids about the 1890s oyster harvest in New York Harbor for instance. Sadly, there is apparently no easy or cost effective way to get from paper to electrons in any kind of large volume without taking inordinate amounts of time. As long as it’s cheaper to buy everything over again as a new ebook than it is to copy what I’ve got already, the paper products won’t be flying off the shelves around her.

I usually shoot for three, but like I said, it hasn’t been an awful week. Check back tomorrow, though, because it’s Friday and something is sure to fly off the hinges 30 minutes before quitting time

I’ve been a bad, bad boy…

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It’s been a while since I wrote anything here. I don’t know exactly if that’s because things have gotten less stupid or I’m simply becoming use to the same level of stupid as before. Regardless, there are still a few moments when all I can do is sit back and shake my head.

As it turns out, I’ve been a bad, bad boy. I’ve been talking to people in other offices without the express, written permission of their supervisor. That, apparently, constitutes a gross violation of civil conduct and is an affront to the gods themselves. After half a career, you’d think I would remember that trying to get information directly from the source will do nothing but get you into trouble.

Instead of asking Person A directly for the information I need, the Official Process demands that I ask Person B, who will direct Person C to oversee the request for information and, who will thusly inform Person A that a request for information has been made. The information requested can then be transmitted back to me by the same circuitous route. Instead of taking 15 minutes, the process will take three days, involve, a minimum of two extra people, and has garnered three angry emails reminding me that “it’s not ok to talk to people from other offices without permission.” We could have saved an inordinate amount of time by any one of those three people simply answering the question rather than engaging in some half assed turf war, but there you have it, your bureaucracy in action… or is that your bureaucracy inaction?

So yes, please consider me sufficiently chastised for cheekily disregarding the standard routing of requests for information in an effort to actually get something done in a timely manner. Rest assured when it comes time to toss someone under the bus for delaying the project, I’ll have no qualms at all about reminding the Powers That Be who has been jamming their sabots into the machinery.

Editorial Note: This part of a continuing series of posts previously available on a now defunct website. They are appearing on http://www.jeffreytharp.com for the first time. This post has been time stamped to correspond to its original publication date.

Burdens of leadership…

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There are a number of reasons I’m not likely to ever be drug kicking and screaming into a position of leadership. Aside from the fact that it just plain doesn’t interest me from anything other than an academic standpoint, I loathe putting on a jacket and tie just to sit at a desk all day, small talk and glad handing make me want to poke myself in the eye with a pointy stick, and really, the only screw ups I want to be responsible for in life are the ones I make myself. With all of that being said, should the worst ever happen and I get stuck in one of these positions, I hope that I remember the little things; like knowing how to get from Point A to Point B without six other people managing the arrangements for me, or being able to have a conversation with my contemporaries without needing hundreds of slides and a stack of memos to decide what I want to say. I’d especially want to remember that normal people tend to have interests and obligations that aren’t work related so keeping them standing around early in the morning and well after close of business should be avoided.

I’m not even going to get into how bloody obnoxious it would be to basically have no control over my own schedule. Being shuffled around from place to place and meeting to meeting with just a few notes jammed in my hand at the last minute would drive me right up to the edge of wanting to beat people with my shoe. I’m glad there are people who welcome that level of pain in the ass, but frankly I’m ecstatic that I’m not cut out to be one of them. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to stick my nose in a book about the Danish invasion of England. That’s way more interesting than a three ring binder chuck full of information about the fun things to see, do, and talk about at Fort Pignuckle, Louisiana.

Doing God’s work…

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Sometimes I leave the office at the end of the day feel like I’m doing God’s own work. Other times I feel like I’ve spent the day beating myself bloody against a great stone wall. Nothing uncommon about that, I guess. The problem isn’t that there’s too much or too little to do, as much as it is there’s no moderating influence. Monday might be silent as a tomb and the next day you run with your hair on fire from the time you set foot in the building. That’s not a complaint (seriously), just a statement of fact. Still, it would be awfully nice if there was some way to smooth out the peaks and valleys on the demand side of the equation. When I figure that out, I’ll get busy writing my best selling leadership and management book and retire with a nice royalty check. Until then, I’ll just keep my head down until the winds shift.

Since I’m always the optimist, it’s worth noting that I still smile when I drive across the Susquehanna at 4:25 every afternoon. It’s worth remembering that no matter how strange the day has been, my days were always stranger in West Tennessee than this place could ever hope to be. The benefit of having been on the bottom looking up is that by comparison, everything else looks like ice cream and lollipops.

When the cat’s away…

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When the cat’s away, your office will inevitably be overseen by a overly officious colleague intoxicated by their temporary power. They’re going to do things like try to change procedures that have been in place in your office for as long as you’ve been there and tell you to do things that are patently incorrect. To fill the white space in their day, this individual will flit to whatever meetings they can find and generally try to make a nuisance of themselves on what should be a nice quiet day for getting caught up on those things you never seem to get to when the boss is around. It’s like turning over the office to that annoying kid you remember from elementary school that always had their hand up, always knew the answer, and always volunteered to make copies or keep the list of “bad” students when the teacher had to step out of the room. Since it only lasts for a day or two, you’re basically in Purgatory… assuming that Purgatory is run by a mentally deficient thirteen year old, since that’s basically the level of leadership you’ll be getting.

My advice in this situation? Smile and nod whenever possible. Avoid eye contact and if necessary feign digestive distress to minimize the amount of time you must spend in conversation with your tormenter. Absolutely nothing good with come from your engaging this pseudo-leader. At best, you’ll end up having to explain to your actual boss why you called this individual as useless as tits on a bull in front of several of your other colleagues. At worst, your boss may realize the error of his ways and leave you in charge next time he’s going to be away, which makes the cure far worse than the actual disease.

Editorial Note: This part of a continuing series of posts previously available on a now defunct website. They are appearing on http://www.jeffreytharp.com for the first time. This post has been time stamped to correspond to its original publication date.

The eternal meeting…

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We have the same meeting every two weeks. I don’t mean just a regularly occurring staff meeting or anything, but rather a meeting where we all get together and discuss the exact same issue, come to the exact same conclusions, and then part company knowing full well that we’re going to do it again in 14 days just like clockwork. Nobody, myself included, has the intestinal fortitude to recommend that we stop having this meeting so it seems possible that it will continue on indefinitely into the future, just as it has been held for as long as any of the current participants can remember.

As far as I can tell, meetings are the great enemy of government work – probably work in any large organization. I’m not saying if we cancelled this meeting that my productivity would suddenly jump by 200%, but it would free up an hour or two every week to do something, anything that might be even marginally productive. After all, when what you’re currently doing is complete dead time, even a fractional improvement in how you spend your day is a huge improvement in productivity. That’s not even counting the morale bump that would come from permanently cancelling time sucks like this one. Of course the likelihood of any of that coming to pass is somewhere between slim and none, so if you’ll excuse me, I have a meeting to go to.

Editorial Note: This part of a continuing series of posts previously available on a now defunct website. They are appearing on http://www.jeffreytharp.com for the first time. This post has been time stamped to correspond to its original publication date.

Rework…

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Interpreting policy memos, white papers, and more informal summaries are my bread and butter. I’ve got a bit of a knack for distilling ten pages of official-ese into a one or two paragraph overview. I may not be an expert on whatever topics are dropped in front of me, but I’ve cultivated a skill at seeing through extraneous bullshit and identifying what someone needs to know versus what’s actually written on the page. Sometimes that’s a skill that’s more trouble than it’s worth.

At 10:00 yesterday morning I was given a couple of dozen pages and told to gin up a two page summary by 3:00. No problem there. That’s plenty of time to get the job done and still manage a leisurely lunch. The real issue is boss who drops by at 2:45 to provide some helpful insight on the areas he wants to highlight. While that guidance might have been helpful at some point, it wasn’t particularly useful after spending four hours developing my own salient points.

So today, I’ll spend another three or four hours covering the same ground, but putting a slightly different spin on it. Any chance I had of feeling productive this week is officially dead.

Editorial Note: This part of a continuing series of posts previously available on a now defunct website. They are appearing on http://www.jeffreytharp.com for the first time. This post has been time stamped to correspond to its original publication date.