The Fear of Excellence
This is a most serious
recommendation to my many colleagues in different phases of
their careers in public administration. The message is: Never
fear working with people who perform and behave with
excellence. Isnt that self evident? Why should it even be
brought up?
The reason: There is a
significant segment of people in all walks of life who feel
threatened by working with someone who is outstanding at what
they do.
Finding a job you love in a
career field you love is a wonderful and critically important
variable to living a happy and successful life. Imagine being
sentenced to life in prison inside a job that you find boring
and dispiriting.
Imagine that, for whatever
reason, you feel trapped by economics, little self
confidence, fear of failure or any other reasons that prevent
you from ever seeking out or taking a risk.
Perhaps you are a consummate
bureaucrat who is at home in a room whose walls are
constructed of the piles of past versions of rule and
regulation handbooks. Perhaps you are the master or mistress
of the past history of these rules and are able to cite
chapter and verse to cover almost any event in the life of the
organization. It can be disconcerting to imagine a world in
which the rules change, or other people know them better than
you do.
It is comforting, on the
other hand, to sit in your office and be approached by a
stream of colleagues who need your interpretations of the
rules or signature on some form, perhaps created years earlier
by you, in order for their assignments in the organization to
be successfully fulfilled.
This scenario can be true in
any government agency, but especially those involved in
licensure, such as building and permitting departments or
internal administration. The HR Doctor recalls being on a
conference program with the president of a national government
purchasing organization who introduced his presentation by
saying Im from Purchasing. My job is to pour epoxy into the
wheels of government so they will run smoother!
Human Resources, in a civil
service environment, is also notorious for creating rules and
insisting that they be applied even if the original purpose
and value of the rule has long since been forgotten.
In todays environment,
however, the likely top winner of the most bureaucratic
annual competition is not purchasing, HR, or even Payroll or
OSHA. It is the health care agency. It is increasingly full of
forms and processes which ensure payment to providers and
insulation from lawyers, but have the net effect of stretching
to the breaking point the patience of the patients. As if you
were not already ill enough when you entered the health care
system, you are certainly likely to leave the emergency room,
hospital or clinic with a new medical problem carpal tunnel
syndrome from signing a vast library of forms.
The trick to career
happiness is to find a field of work and, ideally, a place to
work in which you are respected as an individual, encouraged
to be innovative, and free to challenge and improve on the
existing way business is conducted.
Certainly, not all members
of the workgroup have the courage, optimism and compelling
urgency to take what others might regard as a major career
risk by actually challenging the status quo. Questioning the
status quo can be regarded by entrenched colleagues as
questioning their livelihood and their contribution over years
or decades. It is no wonder that a bright can do spirited
person coming to work in a bureaucracy will often become
frustrated.
They may come to realize
that their vision of how they could change the world, or their
little part of it, is crashing and burning against the walls
of the bureaucracy. They may find that they were never taught
in public administration courses about realities as well as
text book learning.
Providing this learning
balance is part of why the HR Doctor has continued for more
than 25 years to thoroughly enjoy teaching graduate students
about HR and public administration. Perhaps this reality of
contrast is one reason why there is a rather high turnover in
the teaching profession and the nursing profession. That
self-questioning and self-doubt is also present in the world
of medicine.
The HR Doctor once served as
vice president in a giant hospital system. There were
physicians and multiple nurses on that HR staff who had chosen
HR over the practice of their original health care professions
for which they had spent so many years training. The reason
was that they felt unable to practice the way they believed
they should and were hungry for the variety and exposure to
human behavior that they found in HR. It is truly a joy and an
important time in life when you connect with a profession and
with colleagues who bring you happiness.
One of the lessons for a new
arrival in a bureaucracy is to make it a personal passion to
find ways to improve the procedures and the way of doing
business inside an organization. It is an art form to be a
creative catalyst for change in such a way that people will
regard you as a go to colleague, rather than as a threat or
as a person who is someone who will claw over your body in
order to get promoted or recognized.
If you are one of the
entrenched folks who regard change and innovation as more
threatening than exciting, imagine all you are missing by not
applying that storehouse of knowledge and experience to be an
extraordinary agent of positive change. Who better to modify a
civil service system, for example, than someone who has seen
the previous system take too long, be too complicated and
frustrate other people as well as yourself? Who better to
understand how changes can take place which are helpful and
clearer in understanding than what went on before?
If all that experience and
education can be merged with an attitude of innovation, and
why not change? rather than a default against change, the
result can see an organization through what might seem like
the most difficult budget, technology or human behavior crises
imaginable.
The most successful people
at work respond to a new colleague who performs with
excellence and brings new ideas to the workplace by being
welcoming and encouraging, and perhaps sharing their own ideas
rather than resisting the changes. Excellence in behavior and
performance should be a role model for all of us, rather than
something we fear or worry about.
As I say to my colleagues in
the government entity in which I serve, Im only renting this
chair from the taxpayers. I will surrender the chair gladly
at some point, most likely when the fun-to-frustration ratio
turns sour. Part of my job is to ensure that I am quite
replaceable, and in fact that the agency will likely be in
better hands after I leave than even when I was present.
Working with people of excellence, with diverse thoughts and a
sense of constructive improvement, is very much a part of the
joy of finding a profession and a workplace that helps you
live longer.
Whether you think of it as
purely selfish because it will make your own life richer to
work with great people or because you can give away projects
and know that they will be well managed, or whether you
personally feel challenged to excel by working with such
colleagues, the outcome is still the same.
Isnt this the essence of
successful behavior-change programs such as Weight Watchers,
Alcoholics Anonymous or hiring a personal trainer? Being
challenged positively by a workplace colleague helps you
improve your own performance. It provides another model for
you to consider in your work life and in your home life. I am
inspired very regularly by participating in the lives, the
adventures and the spirit of optimism that I see in my two
beautiful HR daughters and my wonderful wife Charlotte. I
dont fear their excellence. I relish it. Try some
of that relish in your own life.
Phil Rosenberg The HR
Doctor http://www.hrdr.net/
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