Tag Archives: training

Time keeps on slippin’…

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I got to spend an entire day this week in class. You can imagine my unrestrained joy at being given this “opportunity.” Still, there’s an old saying that goes something like “Early is on time, on time is late, and late is unacceptable.” Of course sometimes life happens and even the most obsessive of us can arrive a few minutes late to our destination. On any given day when how long it takes you to get back from lunch doesn’t really matter to anyone, extending your meal a bit doesn’t hurt at all. Since this was one of those moments that we were all in it together and nothing was going to happen until all the butts were back in all the seats, what possessed one car full of you to decide it was a good day to take a two hour lunch? I mean, I don’t like this class any better than you do, but somehow I managed to wander back it at something approximating on time, even if that was mostly driven by the desire to get things over with as soon as possible. You tools, on the other hand, seemed dead set on dragging a long day out even further.

I thought the lip smacking and crinkling of paper wrappers when you got back was an exceptionally well planned touch, by the way. I mean how on earth could you have spent two hours out wandering around and not managed to spend at least some of that time jamming half a sandwich into the filthy stinking sewer that you call a mouth? Your incompetence, lack of interest in anything other than yourself, and dare I say apathy, has reset the bar for the rest of us. Look, I may be an apathetic fuck, but I somehow manage not to let my own proclivities bleed over and cause problems for other people. All I’d ask is for the same courtesy of not screwing the rest of us because you’re having a bad day or can’t be bothered to do two things simultaneously.

The crowning irony of our little drama today was that we were all part of a new mandatory-for-the-universe class on improving professional conduct in the workplace. Maybe this was part of the class – A living example of how not to do things.

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 bad touch…

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In the last 40 hours of work, slightly more than four of those hours have been dedicated to reeducating us on constitutes appropriate versus inappropriate comments, innuendo, and/or touching. That’s more than one tenth of the last work week focused on this stuff. In my years working for this Big Government Agency, I haven’t yet run across anyone who actually thinks sexual harassment is a good idea, so I’m forced to wonder if this latest round of training is maybe a little off the mark. I mean did anyone wake up this morning thinking that they were going to come to the office and start talking about the rack size of dime piece piece sitting next to them? Even if they’re thinking it, most people have a sufficient instinct for self preservation to know that they shouldn’t say it out loud… or at least within earshot.

Look, I’m not naïve enough to think that it doesn’t happen, but I don’t think the key to solving the problem lies in more training. The response to every leadership issue for the last decade has been “obviously that happened because we’re not doing enough training.” But seriously, how much training do we need to make the point that rape, pillage, and plunder are not acceptable workplace activities? The thing is, plenty of people get the training and just don’t care. Telling people that X, Y, and Z are bad doesn’t change the way they feel even if it manages to change the way they act when they think people are watching.

From my ant’s eye view of the bureaucracy, a spike in harassment complaints isn’t a failure of training. It’s a failure of management and dare I say leadership. When management doesn’t respond to a validated complaint with swift and furious action, it establishes a climate of permissiveness and that climate says far more about how the organization feels about “inappropriate” actions than a ream of policy memos and endless hours of training. If leadership were serious about it being an issue, heads would roll every time they find out something happened, but it’s obvious to even a working schmo like me that if they keep doing what they’re doing, they’ll keep getting what they got.

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.

Guilt…

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I’ve been feeling guilty lately. Because I’ve never really trusted them not to either pee all over everything or shred every rug in the house, Winston and Maggie have slept in their kennels at night since they were puppies. They seemed find with it and since dogs sleep about two-thirds of the day anyway, I sort of figured it was no harm/no foul. It was leaving work late the last two days that got me thinking, though… On a typical weekday, when I leave on time and get home on time, they’re in their crates about 17 hours a day. That leaves seven hours for wandering around, sniffing, pooping, barking, and doing dog stuff. When I leave early or get home late, of course, that number decreases dramatically. And that’s when the guilt started.

Intellectually, I’m convinced that both of them are perfectly happy snoozing in their crates as they are on the living room floor. Emotionally, though, I felt a compulsion to give them a shot at having the run of the house at night. I don’t think I’ll ever be comfortable enough to let them wander all day while I’m gone, but surely if I’m there at night there’s a limit to how much trouble they can get themselves into without waking me up, right?

Well, it’s so far so good. Last night was the first step in this grand experiment. When I went to bed, Maggie sprawled out taking up more space than seems possible for an 80 pound Labrador. I’m not sure how big a fan of that I am yet, but it seems that the precedent is already set. Winston, I’m fairly certain, slept in the basement until around 3AM, when he came upstairs wanting an early morning belly rub. I’m not sure I’m going to be a fan of that, either. Other than those relatively minor issues, the test run went well. Nothing got destroyed. Nothing (obvious) got peed on. And they both seemed perfectly happy to lay around the bedroom until I got ready to take them out this morning.

Like I said, I know it’s nothing but my own guilt at getting home late that’s driving this, but I secretly hope they’ll prove trustworthy enough to justify this new degree of freedom.

Logic doesn’t live here…

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I’ve been doing this long enough now that I’m always a little surprised when something is ridiculous enough to shock me. That’s why I could only smirk when someone came by and asked me if I was going to training this morning. After explaining that I had just taken that training last month, my esteemed colleague looked around nervously before explaining that last month’s training covered me only for last fiscal year. This month’s training was required to cover me for the current fiscal year. By some fluke of scheduling it was just pure chance that the exact same class happened to get scheduled in back to back months.

Some people would find this odd, perhaps, but I’ve been a cog in Uncle’s machine long enough to know when I won’t get ahead by asking any more questions. This morning was one of those times and I dutifully went to the auditorium so they could update my now 42 day old certification. The snores coming from the guy beside me and the one two rows over fed into my hunch that I wasn’t the only one sitting here for the second time in as many months. Like the good troopers we are, we checked the box and hopefully won’t see this class for another 13 months.

So much for a productive morning.

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.

Penny wise…

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I’m usually a fan of doing things online whenever possible. The internet frees us from the bounds of 9-5 and lets people engage when and as their schedule permits. With that said, how you “do” something online needs to be considered before the powers that be decide to make the leap from real world to electrons. It’s been my experience that unless an online class is really very well designed and engaging, it quickly becomes an exercise in clicking the “next” button until the machine rewards you with a certificate of completion. In many things this is good enough in that at least people will know where to go get information even if they don’t know exactly what information they need. That’s well and good most of the time.

When it comes to training the next generation of supervisors, I have a hard time swallowing the idea that a week-long class on the dos and don’ts of labor law, equal employment opportunity, and dealing with unions can be quite so nicely condensed. Training the people who are supposed to enforce the standards by letting them click through a set of slides on their own is a terrible idea. There are enough piss poor supervisors already and we really, really need to get this one right. Expecting the new guy to “learn on the fly” is pretty much your standard recipe for disaster. Look, I know funds are tight, but this is a pay me now or pay me later situation. By doing it right from the beginning, how much cost avoidance will you realize by preventing the inevitable increase in EEO, prohibited personnel practice, and fair labor standards settlements?

Can we please, just this once, look more than 15 feet down the road when deciding how to save budget dollars?

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.

Arrrrrrmy training, sir…

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One of the great old saws about the Army is that it trains as it fights. That is to say that in theory, the Army likes it’s training to approximate real world environments. That helps explain why we dump million of dollars into out of the way places like Ft. Polk, Louisiana and Ft. Irwin, California. They’re some of the last places in the country where large groups of men and equipment can careen across the wilderness unhampered by complaints by decent taxpaying citizens.

I’m not sure this training ethos holds true for Uncle’s vast army of civilian employees. I’ve spent the better part of today sitting in an auditorium with 200-odd colleagues watching as a contractor navigated around the interweb teaching us how to do file management, set permissions, and covering the importance of information sharing and security. The next two days promise more of the same. This probably doesn’t qualify as training as we fight. Then again, looking around at the blank stares and acres of trees sacrificed to make PowerPoint printouts, maybe it is.

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

Know how…

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Apparently it’s important to the war effort that I learn how to build a website. Well, “build” might be a bit of a stretch. What I’m “learning” to do is slid pre-scripted widgets around on a pre-approved layout with complete freedom to select border colors and add italics where appropriate. So you can all disabuse yourselves of the notion of me slaving feverishly to churn out fully developed Flash or HTML. What I’m doing is the paint-by-numbers version of website construction. Paint-by-number is fine and certainly has a place, but alot of headaches could have been avoided if someone would have asked me first if I had any experience doing that kind of work. I’m fairly sure putzing around with SharePoint for the last four years, managing a couple of blogs, knowing how to log into Facebook, and being willing to play around with tech until I figure out how to make it work would have probably been sufficient training. Of course none of that comes with a certificate, so it represents unofficial know how. And we certainly wouldn’t want to turn unofficial know how loose on an official network. No good could come from that. Besides, by this time tomorrow I’ll have a fancy new certificate. So there.

A matter of priorities…

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So far we’ve had two meetings today with the Uberboss. One topic was a training program that no one wants to participate in and the other is about a report that literally no one is going to read. How do I know that no one will read it? Easy. The office that requested the report in the first place no longer exists. But I digress.

I’m not saying that management has its priorities jacked up, but at some point in the near future, we might want to actually schedule a meeting about the year’s budget request that has been rejected twice now by the home office. Way back when dinosaurs ruled the earth and I was an MBA student, I learned that having a budget and sticking to it was among the most important things I needed to do as a manager. Maybe I missed the day when they went over the part where they were joking and really the budget was just something you should blow off since no one really needs money anyway. Or maybe he just went to a different school.

So, once again our fearless leader is at war with his own superiors. Yeah, I’m sure this is going to end well. Maybe we should just schedule a meeting to talk about new signage for office doors… Which would be funny if it weren’t already on the calendar for next week.

Editorial Note: This part of a continuing series of previously de-published blogs appearing on http://www.jeffreytharp.com for the first time. This post has been time stamped to correspond to its original publication date.

Well trained…

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As a matter of policy, we want a well trained and highly educated workforce to carry out the agency’s business. One of the great military-as-management-philosophy aphorisms is that an organization should “train as it fights.” That is to say, it should build its training program based on situations and circumstances it will encounter in the real world. Of course that’s not the standard we train against.

Our training is driven by a “points” system. Each of several hundred real world and online courses are valued as a specific number of training points. Once you reach the prescribed number of points for the year, you are, by definition, “well trained.” This is great if your objective is to be well trained in as short a time as possible; not so much if you actually want to learn something. Then again, learning something isn’t actually part of the training requirement so if it happens, that’s mostly just a bonus.

On a recent morning I had a few hours of unplanned free time, I racked up more than half of my required yearly points after about three hours of clicking through various PowerPoint slides and Flash presentations… while also having discussions with other staffers, answering the phone, sending email, and monitoring breaking news on Charlie Sheen. I don’t think that was necessarily the kind of quality learning the training office hoped to achieve, but that’s what happens when you base the requirement on earning a fixed number of points rather than on actual knowledge gained or skills needed to stay current in your career field. This is doubly true when you write off professional pride as a motivating factor.

Fortunately, I’m now officially “well trained” for 2011… so I can put this sad, sad experience out of my mind for another 11 months.

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

Signs, signs, everywhere there’s signs…

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When things start coming off the rails, there are usually alot of small indicators that its about to happen or that it’s actually started happening. If you’re lucky, you’ll know what those indicators are when you see them. If you’re not, well, aren’t you in for a surprise?

Maybe the best heads up that stupid is in firm control of the situation is when the word goes out that it’s mandatory that everyone get along with one another. Respect is a slippery thing. The best people command it just because of who they are. They wear it like a cloak of authority. The second tier will get respect because of the position they happen to occupy. People will follow them, but their hearts aren’t likely to be in it. The worst of the lot try to command respect through intimidation and by exerting good old fashioned command and control. Sure, that works… For a while. In the end, all you’ve done is breed a culture of resentment, driven real opinion underground, and created a world where it’s better to hide than stand out. In that environment, you’ve set the stage for dissent, frustration, apathy – the great hallmarks of a race to the bottom and the time when you have to start telling people to be nice to each other.

Once you’re bogged down in that morass extracting yourself is a bit of a problem. Not impossible, but certainly not easy. The tendency of people is to stick to what they know. The factions will pile up. The conflict will continue. It’s the only release valve left when you’ve slammed shut the only other avenues of advance. No one wants to fail as a matter of principle and for the most part, people want to believe what they are doing makes a difference. Take that away and what’s left is a tiny universe filled with the cynical, the sarcastic, and the discontented. Not exactly a recipe for high performance teaming.

All the “Working with Difficult People” training and be nice to each other pep talks in the world aren’t going to fix that. At best, it only recognizes that things are on their way from bad to worse. That’s something, I suppose.