A little competence goes a long ways
Competency is, unfortunately, somewhat of a rare thing. Some people are immediately recognizable as being very capable the moment you meet them. One of the first clues is often that you can tell they are listening when you talk to them, and they can provide proper feedback or guidance when necessary. If you work with them, they acknowledge that they are there to do a job, and as soon as it is explained to them, they will go about completing it. When they say they’ll do something, you can expect it get done. If they make a mistake, they’ll take responsibility and take steps to fix it. These are our true leaders, and at the very least our good worker bees.
On the other side of the spectrum, there are people who are for all practical purposes useless. They have no drive, and are seldom dependable. Make excusing or covering up a mistake take priority over fixing it. Although they are perfectly willing to stand there and allow the compressed air waves emitting from your vibrating vocal chords to move the small bones in their inner ears and produce electric signals in their brain, there is no promise of making any practical use of those signals. The main problem is that these incompetents will not distinguish the difference working towards a goal, and simply being there while the clock counts down.
My first experience with the competence/incompetence issue on a large scale occurred as a teenager working at the Food Mart. (Ahh, the Food Mart). It was a typical small town grocery store with a number of full time adult employees and a number of high school age kids to fill in the nights and weekend hours. Some of the kids were the competent type, many weren’t. The adults, well, lets just say they worked at a grocery store. At the time I thought that a handful of us were probably the smartest employees at the store, including the management. Looking back now, I’m even more in agreement with that statement.
The competency divide was established very clearly after any new employee was hired. They either got their work done, or they didn’t. In many cases it was the later. There usually wasn’t much of a middle ground, and worse, this was generally just accepted; no probation, no reviews, and no firing. It was just a fact that another person would now be showing up, getting paid, and accomplishing nothing. Although I admit we were minimum wage labor, and that this wasn’t exactly rocket science or saving the world stuff, just stocking shelves and carrying out groceries, still, a lesson was learned. Some of will do, some of us will not. Some of us will build, while others will just consume. Some of us will live, and the remaining will merely exist. (We still get paid the same though.)
If you’re lucky, you’ll have an employer that appreciates competent people. This was not generally the case at the Food Mart. I think that the first manager knew at least on some subconscious level, that half of the stockers were smarter than he was, and he took petty joy over being able to control us. Needless to say, the store was run pretty poorly. In later years, a different manager took a different approach. He realized that he was sitting on a goldmine of competent labor that would work at slave prices, and had no problem using that to all our advantage. He gave us more power and responsibility along with a small raise, and in exchange he got a much smoother operating store.
Years have passed now, however the lesson still remains. What I thought was a problem isolated to a bottom labor force of which some in it would raise above to bigger and better things later in life, is actually a problem that persists elsewhere. Although I work at a great company that has a work force of talented and diverse people, incompetence is still noticeable if you look between the lines. Since it’s a more educated field, the number of people who come from middle class suburban families is drastically increased. I don’t know of any other recent college grads that are first generation college educated. They have the education, some ambition, and even some responsibility, but many often still lack the drive. To many, this is the only job they’ve really had, and have no idea how good it is. To others, they are simply good quality worker bees caught up in a queen’s world. Luckily, we have a very formal review process every 6 months to weed out any non-contributing staff.
One of my points though, is that the managers I had for the first 12 months at my job love me simply because I was competent. All I had to do was be dependable and think a little bit about what I do, and suddenly it’s hard for me to screw even if I try. Although I have no problem staying at work late, or coming in early, I’ll often purposely sleep in if I’m tired, or leave early. Although I do consider myself somewhat of a better worker relative to others, I’ve been preoccupied a lot, and wouldn’t grade myself that great on an objective level, or compared to what I’m capable of.
A good example of a situation that should have made me look poor was two weeks ago. I was wrapping up some reliability data for product qualification that was just about due. Gathering the data had taken a couple of weeks because the collection process was menial and tedious. We’d usually have technicians do it, but are short staffed, so I was fitting it in between other work. As a result I was already a few weeks behind the completion date I had originally indicated. When I handed the data all in, it was all wrong; the units hadn’t been setup properly from the beginning. As far as I’m concerned, this was my fault. Even though technicians did the setup, I should have checked the patterns stored in the memory before hand. I knew that a bug in the setup algorithms had caused improper setup in the past, yet I didn’t even check one unit. More so, I should have noticed it while testing, and should have at least noticed it while wrapping up the data. I messed up, and immediately said that it was my fault. To remedy it, I aligned resources and put together a plan to complete another data turn in as short a time as possible. After getting all the data recollected, and submitted 48 hours later, I found out that I had now made another mistake, this time a simple omission in the spread sheet. Here’s where it gets even better.
I had left work immediately after emailing the spread sheet of data to the colleague in New Mexico who was doing more analysis on it. He had replied an hour later, pointing out my mistake. Since I had already left work though, I didn’t get the email until 11:30pm that evening when I took a study break to check my work account. The only reason I was checking my work account in the first place was because I was already planning on showing up late the next day. The mistake was a quick fix, and I re-sent the spreadsheet within a couple of hours. When I got to work the next morning I found that during an early morning conference call meeting, the colleague in New Mexico had stood up for our department in California, thinking that I had actually been working until 11:30 the previous night. Overall, I was treated like I had gone out of my way, when in reality all I had done was, well, my job. That should be expected. If I hadn’t messed up in the first place, I wouldn’t have had to push it so close.
This brings me to my final point. If you’re competent in your work, you can get away with so much!!. First off, people are willing to overlook minor things if they know that you have the important stuff covered, particularly if they trust that you’re not going to mess up anything that is going to cause more work for them, or make them look bad. Second, if you’re more productive in general, people will assume that you are working hard, and won’t question your actions, unknowing that you already finished your work and are simply screwing off.
Case in point, the Food Mart. I won’t go into details; those who were there in the glory days need no reminders. A while back at my current job I skipped out early of a department meeting to go to the lab to finish some work. It sounds dedicated, but in reality, I needed to get my work done then so I could go to a different meeting for organizing this years bike to work day, and then leave work early to meet a potential new roommate. What I didn’t know is that a group of us were getting recognized for a project we had completed last year. What happened though was that my name got left off the award list, which didn’t really matter any way since I wasn’t there. I didn’t find out about it until the next morning when my managers were apologizing to me not only for me having to work through the meeting, but more so for me getting recognized, a fact that means little to me.
Like I said, a little competence can buy a lot in the world.
On the other side of the spectrum, there are people who are for all practical purposes useless. They have no drive, and are seldom dependable. Make excusing or covering up a mistake take priority over fixing it. Although they are perfectly willing to stand there and allow the compressed air waves emitting from your vibrating vocal chords to move the small bones in their inner ears and produce electric signals in their brain, there is no promise of making any practical use of those signals. The main problem is that these incompetents will not distinguish the difference working towards a goal, and simply being there while the clock counts down.
My first experience with the competence/incompetence issue on a large scale occurred as a teenager working at the Food Mart. (Ahh, the Food Mart). It was a typical small town grocery store with a number of full time adult employees and a number of high school age kids to fill in the nights and weekend hours. Some of the kids were the competent type, many weren’t. The adults, well, lets just say they worked at a grocery store. At the time I thought that a handful of us were probably the smartest employees at the store, including the management. Looking back now, I’m even more in agreement with that statement.
The competency divide was established very clearly after any new employee was hired. They either got their work done, or they didn’t. In many cases it was the later. There usually wasn’t much of a middle ground, and worse, this was generally just accepted; no probation, no reviews, and no firing. It was just a fact that another person would now be showing up, getting paid, and accomplishing nothing. Although I admit we were minimum wage labor, and that this wasn’t exactly rocket science or saving the world stuff, just stocking shelves and carrying out groceries, still, a lesson was learned. Some of will do, some of us will not. Some of us will build, while others will just consume. Some of us will live, and the remaining will merely exist. (We still get paid the same though.)
If you’re lucky, you’ll have an employer that appreciates competent people. This was not generally the case at the Food Mart. I think that the first manager knew at least on some subconscious level, that half of the stockers were smarter than he was, and he took petty joy over being able to control us. Needless to say, the store was run pretty poorly. In later years, a different manager took a different approach. He realized that he was sitting on a goldmine of competent labor that would work at slave prices, and had no problem using that to all our advantage. He gave us more power and responsibility along with a small raise, and in exchange he got a much smoother operating store.
Years have passed now, however the lesson still remains. What I thought was a problem isolated to a bottom labor force of which some in it would raise above to bigger and better things later in life, is actually a problem that persists elsewhere. Although I work at a great company that has a work force of talented and diverse people, incompetence is still noticeable if you look between the lines. Since it’s a more educated field, the number of people who come from middle class suburban families is drastically increased. I don’t know of any other recent college grads that are first generation college educated. They have the education, some ambition, and even some responsibility, but many often still lack the drive. To many, this is the only job they’ve really had, and have no idea how good it is. To others, they are simply good quality worker bees caught up in a queen’s world. Luckily, we have a very formal review process every 6 months to weed out any non-contributing staff.
One of my points though, is that the managers I had for the first 12 months at my job love me simply because I was competent. All I had to do was be dependable and think a little bit about what I do, and suddenly it’s hard for me to screw even if I try. Although I have no problem staying at work late, or coming in early, I’ll often purposely sleep in if I’m tired, or leave early. Although I do consider myself somewhat of a better worker relative to others, I’ve been preoccupied a lot, and wouldn’t grade myself that great on an objective level, or compared to what I’m capable of.
A good example of a situation that should have made me look poor was two weeks ago. I was wrapping up some reliability data for product qualification that was just about due. Gathering the data had taken a couple of weeks because the collection process was menial and tedious. We’d usually have technicians do it, but are short staffed, so I was fitting it in between other work. As a result I was already a few weeks behind the completion date I had originally indicated. When I handed the data all in, it was all wrong; the units hadn’t been setup properly from the beginning. As far as I’m concerned, this was my fault. Even though technicians did the setup, I should have checked the patterns stored in the memory before hand. I knew that a bug in the setup algorithms had caused improper setup in the past, yet I didn’t even check one unit. More so, I should have noticed it while testing, and should have at least noticed it while wrapping up the data. I messed up, and immediately said that it was my fault. To remedy it, I aligned resources and put together a plan to complete another data turn in as short a time as possible. After getting all the data recollected, and submitted 48 hours later, I found out that I had now made another mistake, this time a simple omission in the spread sheet. Here’s where it gets even better.
I had left work immediately after emailing the spread sheet of data to the colleague in New Mexico who was doing more analysis on it. He had replied an hour later, pointing out my mistake. Since I had already left work though, I didn’t get the email until 11:30pm that evening when I took a study break to check my work account. The only reason I was checking my work account in the first place was because I was already planning on showing up late the next day. The mistake was a quick fix, and I re-sent the spreadsheet within a couple of hours. When I got to work the next morning I found that during an early morning conference call meeting, the colleague in New Mexico had stood up for our department in California, thinking that I had actually been working until 11:30 the previous night. Overall, I was treated like I had gone out of my way, when in reality all I had done was, well, my job. That should be expected. If I hadn’t messed up in the first place, I wouldn’t have had to push it so close.
This brings me to my final point. If you’re competent in your work, you can get away with so much!!. First off, people are willing to overlook minor things if they know that you have the important stuff covered, particularly if they trust that you’re not going to mess up anything that is going to cause more work for them, or make them look bad. Second, if you’re more productive in general, people will assume that you are working hard, and won’t question your actions, unknowing that you already finished your work and are simply screwing off.
Case in point, the Food Mart. I won’t go into details; those who were there in the glory days need no reminders. A while back at my current job I skipped out early of a department meeting to go to the lab to finish some work. It sounds dedicated, but in reality, I needed to get my work done then so I could go to a different meeting for organizing this years bike to work day, and then leave work early to meet a potential new roommate. What I didn’t know is that a group of us were getting recognized for a project we had completed last year. What happened though was that my name got left off the award list, which didn’t really matter any way since I wasn’t there. I didn’t find out about it until the next morning when my managers were apologizing to me not only for me having to work through the meeting, but more so for me getting recognized, a fact that means little to me.
Like I said, a little competence can buy a lot in the world.
posted by Frick at 10:33 PM
1 Comments:
This post is actually for last week. I finally took the exam for my MS degree, so I am done with school, and ready to focus on other things, like real essay writing instead of the half ass posts I've put up the last couple of weeks.
Post a Comment
<< Home