Looking back

I went through a nostalgic period around ten years ago, when I used a lot of time to sort through memories of childhood and young adulthood. It was a fairly creative time for me personally and led to my writing several books of poetry as well as several non-fiction books. My memoir about growing up in Tarrytown New York (A Town and A Valley: Growing Up in Tarrytown and the Hudson Valley: De Angelis, Paula Mary: 9798842022946: Amazon.com: Books) is my homage to a past that meant something to me personally; it was also was a reminder of a simpler time in my hometown's evolution. Tarrytown is no longer the town in which I grew up, nor would I expect it to be. But my childhood memories of it are quite alive in my heart and mind. I tap into them from time to time when I think about my parents, my family, my friends, and my old neighborhood. 

This morning, while I was getting ready for the day, I was reminded of my work past, more specifically, my experience working at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. Little did I know at that time (early 1980s) that it would change my life the way it did. Those changes were positive and far-reaching, but of course I couldn't know that at that time. I found myself thinking about my three bosses--Frank, Zbigniew, and Myron, and how much they supported and encouraged me to reach my full potential in the field of investigative cytology. It is thanks to them that I went on to pursue my doctorate in tumor biology. It is not without a tinge of wistfulness that I think of them; they have all passed away as of this writing. It's strange to think about that, that they are no longer with us. They were good men and immensely qualified professionally. I hope they know how much they meant to me, a young woman starting out in the work world. They gave me a real chance to succeed and I know that is not always the case. And I have no regrets about my work experiences with them. I can't say that about all my work experiences. I was lucky to get the start I got. There was something special about that time in my life. I would imagine all young people starting out in the work world feel that way; that their first years are formative years. They are. A good first work experience helps to shape one's later mindset about working. If the first experience is negative, it destroys trust in the future; I know several young people whose negative first work experiences destroyed their self-confidence. It took them several years to build up their self-image and to be able to trust a potential employer again. 

I don't look back too often anymore. There's far too much going on in the present time for me to dwell on what was or to miss the past. And even if I miss some aspects of the past, the pragmatic part of me knows that it's futile to focus on them. We can't go back, nor would I want to. The experiences of childhood, teenage years, and young adulthood are placed in memory and it is possible to go back to visit from time to time. My way of going back is often through music; I hear a song from those years and I am immediately transported back to those times. I know people who don't want to look back or be reminded at all of the past. That doesn't describe me, even though I wouldn't want to return to the past. The past has its place; the bad or sad things that happened then, happened. I moved on. And even if I had chosen not to 'move on', life would have moved me on anyway, whether I liked it or not.  

Reflections on relevance, leadership, and freedom

Once you are no longer a part of the work world, a certain amount of your professional relevance disappears. For many people, that is the same as their professional identity, and it can be difficult to deal with that 'loss' of identity. Perhaps it is most difficult for those who had leadership responsibilities; it seems to be difficult for some to acknowledge that they are not 'in charge' anymore. They may cast around for new venues that will allow them to be in charge once again, and that can be somewhat disconcerting for those who know them. I don't feel that I've lost my professional identity now that I am no longer working. I am no longer relevant to my former workplace, that's true, but I trained as a scientist and a scientist I will always be. It's in my blood, in the same way as my love of books and movies is in my blood. I've always focused on keeping my personal identity alive. After all, even when I was working, I still had nights and weekends and vacations to pursue my hobbies and interests. And I did. 

There is a lot of freedom in no longer having to be relevant to a workplace. I am now free to write and to verbalize about many aspects of workplaces with which I was dissatisfied. It won't lead to much in the sense that workplaces will continue doing pretty much what they've been doing; my opinions won't change them. But it feels good to have that freedom to comment on them, to not have to be so careful about what I say or how I say it. I've always taken good care to not be rude or destructive in my previous posts about workplaces, and that won't change. But I can now state more emphatically that I agree or disagree with this or that way of doing things. I was able to do that this past summer at a garden party, and it felt good. And one of my former leaders (who is no longer a leader) actually agreed with me, whereas when she was my leader, she would have probably told me that my comments were out of place. It made me view her in a new light, because I thought, ah yes, she too had to report to a leader above her, and that was probably not always the easiest thing to do. So I gained a new understanding of her and her attempts (mostly unsuccessful) at being a good leader. As I've stated before, most of the leaders I've had to do with have not been good leaders. And a few are honest and say that themselves. I'm not sure I would have been a good leader either, at least not a top-level leader. There's too much blah blah ad nauseam. I am solution-oriented; I don't want to meet and talk for hours about how to get something done, I want to discuss what needs to be discussed, come up with some plans for a solution(s) (if there are problems), and execute them. I am practical by nature, at least where the work world is concerned. 

I've been a team and project leader and I've reported to several leaders above me during a long career. I've also participated in committee work at the highest leadership level at my former workplace and found it rather disappointing. I had a (rather) utopian view of it; I thought that there was much more freedom at the top level to set things in motion, to be innovative, to be efficient, to effect change. I found out that that wasn't necessarily the case; more often, it was frustrating work. There wasn't more freedom, because in the end, we are always having to answer to other people; we are never truly free. Top-level leaders must answer to the politicians who deal out the money that keeps public sector workplaces going. And unfortunately politicians don't always understand what's at stake or what is needed. Sometimes it amazes me that anything gets done at all in the public sector. But it does, so that's proof that things do work, albeit very very slowly and in a frustrating manner. I probably would have experienced less frustration in the private sector. But it's a moot point at this juncture in my life. 

Workplace culture

Every so often, when I meet friends for dinner, we inevitably end up talking about work and workplaces in general. Nearly every person I know who is around my age has a story or two to tell about unpleasant occurrences that they've experienced in their respective workplaces. That includes me too. We don't focus on just them--most of us also have good memories of our work projects/results as researchers, but the less than pleasant occurrences are used to illustrate some of the more negative aspects of Norwegian workplace culture, which I am not a huge fan of in general.

Academic research settings in the public sector, where most of my colleagues/friends and I have worked for the past thirty or more years, are strange work environments in which to find oneself, for Norwegians and non-Norwegians alike. I've always assumed that my Norwegian friends understood 'the rules' better than I did; I'm finding out that this is not the case, and that they were not necessarily treated any better (or worse) than I was when I was working. As always, how one was treated came down to politics--who you knew was more important than what you knew--at least if you wanted to get ahead. The Norwegians talk a good game about all employees being treated equally (the same) and that the same opportunities exist for all, but it's not true. Most academic research settings at present are quite hierarchical with many levels of leadership; this was not the case during the 1990s when I started working at my university hospital. At that time the organizational structure was flatter, with fewer levels of leadership. The disadvantages of a flat structure are that there are fewer possibilities to rise in the system (fewer management positions) and that the managers have a more intense workload compared to hierarchical organizations. The advantages of a flat structure (in my opinion) are that each employee has more autonomy and more freedom to be creative, to speak out, and to be heard. Nowadays there is too much micromanagement, too much administration, too much reporting to managers, too much detail-oriented nonsense. It's smothering, claustrophobic and ultimately fatal for innovation and creativity. There were more of the latter during the 1990s in my humble opinion. No matter. Organizational structures became very hierarchical during the early 2000s; in some departments at present, it is not unusual to be confronted with five or more levels of leadership. Dealing with your own leader/manager is one thing, but then he or she must deal with his or her manager who must deal with his or her manager above them in the system, and so forth. Suffice it to say that it is a cumbersome organizational structure with which to deal. I don't like it and didn't like it when I was working. Middle managers have little or no power to decide how something should go, and many of them become frustrated with such a system. Thus, the focus for many of them becomes micromanagement of their employees, many of whom are trying their best to do their best in a system that is not designed to reward them. Because even though one can 'aspire' to a higher position in a hierarchical organization, in practice there is little to no chance of being promoted or being considered for promotion based on your expertise, because it mostly comes down to 'who you know, not what you know'. Neither flat nor hierarchical organizational structures really reward their employees, at least not in huge public sector workplaces. It's stifling to work in them and to work for managers who can do little to help the departments they lead because they must always 'check' with the managers above them before they do anything. Who would want those positions? Apparently, there are those who do want them, because they are well-paid jobs. But what then happens is that a lot of money that could have been appropriated for solving the real problems that exist goes to pay the salaries of (in my opinion again) useless managers. Thus, the system is loaded with powerless managers with bloated salaries. 

If employees don't like this type of work environment, and most of my colleagues/friends and I do (did) not, employees have a real problem. Because their attempts at independent thinking, innovative thinking, critical thinking, creativity, and not wanting to work in team settings will be met with resistance from managers who expect compliance. Employees should not 'buck the system', should not butt heads (however respectfully) with managers, should not criticize, should not attempt to 'go rogue (be a loner)'. The strange thing is that some people do manage to navigate this system that is designed to keep employees down; some probably get ahead because they are well-liked even though they are resistant to the system. Others are given a helping hand by friends in high places (politics). Neither of these occurrences happens to most employees. Most employees who are competent and have a lot of expertise end up having to comply and to swallow rules they don't agree with in order to have a tolerable work environment within which to work. Those who are not compliant suffer the consequences, which boil down to being frozen out, ignored, overlooked for interesting projects, or criticized. Since employees can rarely be fired from a public sector workplace, managers hope that by creating an unpleasant work environment for resistant employees, that it will force them to seek work other places. For smart and competent employees who love their work but not the organizational system, this creates anxiety and problems with self-confidence. Which in turn leads to poorer production and lack of motivation/enthusiasm. This has happened to more people I know than I care to count, both non-Norwegian and Norwegian. 

Who benefits from such a system? Those at the top who enjoy perks and salaries that are largely unjustifiable, and those who have always been lazy, who have always not wanted to expend any more energy at work than they have to. The latter are true drains on the system. And unfortunately, many have learned to manipulate the system, especially when it comes to the aspect of not being able to fire them. These employees invest little energy in their jobs (and in many cases don't show up to work), and if they are criticized by their managers for not doing a good job or for not doing the job they were hired to do, they are allowed by the system to accuse those managers of harassment. The stigma of being unfairly accused of harassment sticks to a manager. Work environments are small enough so that word gets around that this or that person has been accused of harassing an employee. Unpleasant. What then follows is that the 'harassed' employee generally gets a new manager to report to, who has heard the story of what happened to the previous manager and decides that he or she will not make the same mistake as the previous manager. He or she leaves the 'harassed' employee alone to do what he or she wants; in that way, such an employee, often quite lazy and incompetent, remains on the payroll doing little to nothing in the way of work, because no one dares to cross such an employee. If you could fire such an employee from a public sector workplace, it would be a good thing. But it will never happen here. And from what I've seen of the system that does exist, such employees have a lot of power, whereas those who are truly harassed by their managers don't choose that route--to claim being harassed--because they would rather do their jobs well and not be a bother. Competent and hard-working employees often end up doing more than their share of work to compensate for the lack of work done by the lazy and incompetent employees. Unfortunately, a good number of managers leave the incompetent employees alone and instead focus on making life miserable for the competent and hard-working employees. Go figure. 

So again, I ask. What is there to miss about such workplaces? Just during the past two weeks, I've listened to colleagues/friends tell me about their experiences in their workplaces. Overall, they are leaving their jobs with their heads held high; they know they've done good jobs and are satisfied, even if they rarely hear that from their managers. They know they've done the best they could do and have invested a lot of time and energy in their jobs. They may have been treated poorly at times, but they've let those experiences go. Probably best for all concerned. But nonetheless, they do talk about the unpleasant times when we are together because they were hurt by them, as I was. They were blindsided by them. It's understandable. No one expects to be treated poorly when one does a good or excellent job, invests a lot of time and energy in interesting projects, shares ideas and demonstrates independent thinking. But that's exactly what happened to some of them, while they watched the lazy incompetent employees be treated fairly, and in some cases 'promoted'. It makes no sense. But in some way, perhaps it does. Lazy, incompetent employees are no real threat to management. They don't challenge their authority, they are compliant, they do what they are told. But they don't do the work required of them, and management can't do a thing about it, at least in public sector workplaces. Private sector workplaces are another story. Such employees eventually drain the life out of a department. The rest of the staff pick up the slack and will never be rewarded for it. That's how workplaces function here, at least in my experience during the last twenty years. When good employees reach the point where they understand that they could have invested half the amount of time and energy compared to what they actually invested for the same (or no) result, that's when they understand that it's time to leave their workplaces and a workplace culture that is mostly illogical. 

Just about sums it up (the work world, that is!)

 

A leap into the unknown

And so I've taken the next step and a leap into the unknown--in September I will join the ranks of those who have retired early. I've thought long and hard about this decision and have planned well for it, as one of my leaders commented. I have. My responsibilities for research projects and PhD/Masters students are fulfilled; my last PhD student defended her thesis in April. I could go in another direction now and start to study another type of cancer (my focus has been colorectal cancer for my entire academic career), but I don't want to switch fields and there is no more funding to be obtained for my particular research area. I'm proud of the work I've done. I've published nearly one hundred research articles as a main author/co-author and have been a mentor/co-mentor for three Masters students and six PhD students, all of whom successfully finished their degrees. What I've learned after many years in academia is that an academic career is demanding; one must be good at grant-writing, article-writing, mentorship, project planning and execution, networking, academic politics, communication, and diplomacy. I was good at most of it, but not at academic politics and as it evolved, grant-writing. But to be fair, the world of research science changed dramatically compared to when I started out in the mid-1990s. It was easier to write grants and get them funded then. I prefer the way research was done then--in smaller research groups without an emphasis on centers of excellence and platform-based research. I am old-school and do not apologize for it. I do not fit together with big research groups and large research centers, nor am I interested in having to follow a center leader's plan for what type of research project I should focus on. As a senior scientist, I feel that this decision should be left up to me, but often it's not. I've written about all of this before, about how postdocs are used as technicians in large research groups, going from one postdoc position to another and using valuable time trying to please group leaders instead of the group leaders encouraging them to become independent scientists. I would go so far as to say that many group leaders use postdocs as slaves; they know they will get a lot of work out of them, but they don't have to worry about rewarding them in any way. It's unfair, and that's just the way it is. There are scientist associations (unions) working on the problem, but so far it remains that--a problem. 

I won't miss the work world. Either it moved away from me, or I grew beyond it. I grew to want more than it could give me. I used to get really jazzed at the idea of scientific meetings and conferences; I no longer do. It's more a 'been there done that' type of feeling. And I could write a long post about academic politics--how bored I am with them; the truth is that you are either on the current ruling team or you're not. If you're not, you're not important, and that means that your expertise is mostly ignored in favor of someone else who just happens to be on the right political side. And so it goes. Life is not fair, and academic life is definitely not fair. It's who you know, not what you know. I think it's always been that way, and that it will continue to be that way. I also won't miss the feeling of constantly having to do homework--read articles, stay updated, read more articles, plan more research. It's tiring. 

Now that I've informed my leaders, I feel free. I've been walking around for the past year with this decision on my shoulders, so to speak. Should I or shouldn't I? As it turned out, there are personal reasons for why I made the decision now. I won't detail them here, but it has to do with that life is short and that friendships mean more than work. So in a sense, the decision was easy to make. I want to spend more time with friends, not more time at the office. 

Leaving the work world is a leap into the unknown. I look forward to finding out what the next life chapter holds. I don't need to know everything that's going to happen, nor do I want any major plans or responsibilities hanging over me. I want at least one year without any plans or responsibilities. After that, we'll see. One thing is for sure; I will be able to focus on my writing a lot more. It will be nice to have the time to do that, when I want to do it. And if you want to find me most days during spring, summer, and fall, you'll find me in my garden. 

Thinking about the future and retirement when you are young

I’m always a bit surprised by what people respond to on social media sites. I am a rather infrequent commenter myself on social media; it takes a lot to get me to write a pithy response to an online article that I found provocative, timely or interesting. If something strikes me as inherently kind or compassionate, I may write a short note praising the writer for his or her insights and empathy. This past week I read a very short but good article on the Care2 website that dispensed some good advice on how to stop wasting money and to think about the future (http://www.care2.com/greenliving/top-6-ways-we-all-waste-money-and-how-to-stop.html). I thought the article was well-written enough to comment on, and this is what I wrote:

Very good tips. If I could emphasize one thing, it would be this. Think about retirement when you are young and starting out in the work world. It's never too soon to start saving your own money toward retirement.

The Care2 community likes to deal out what it calls Green Stars of Appreciation, and I got quite a few for this little comment (notification by email). All well and good. What struck me was that this way of thinking is perhaps not so widespread as you might think. When I worked at different American workplaces in the 1980s, there was always the requisite orientation day that included presentations of 401K plans and IRAs and that sort of thing, so we were in fact briefly introduced to the topic of retirement. But it wasn’t ‘emphasized’ to think ahead, to sock away as much as possible so that you had a good nest egg for when you were older. And when you’re young, you think you’ll be young forever, so you don’t save as much as you should toward retirement. I asked several people, all of whom are middle-aged like me, whether they had been encouraged to save for retirement when they were young and starting out in the work world. The answer was unanimously ‘no’, and that’s true for me as well. Several of those I talked to wished that it had been hammered into them—save for retirement no matter what.

I make it a point to tell the young people I know to save a lot toward retirement when they’re young. Think income, promotions and salary raises. Look out for yourself. I say this to young women especially, but the advice is relevant for young men as well. Why? When you are young, work matters a lot, in fact, identity becomes wrapped up in one’s work. You love your job and you think you will want to work forever. You don’t consider any other possibility. And the world around you is telling you ‘don't play it safe, take risks, live for now’. But mindsets change as we grow older--gradually for some people, abruptly for others, depending upon how you are treated by your workplaces in many cases when you reach middle-age. Suddenly you may find yourself thinking about retiring early in order to pursue a new career, course of study, hobbies, volunteer work—but you don’t have the funds to retire. You don’t have the freedom to change your life. This might not seem like a big deal to some people, but it is a big deal. It is no fun to be stuck in a job or a way of life you are weary of until you are 70 years of age in order to have enough money to retire. I think it might also be smart to tell young people that they don’t have to have the biggest homes, multiple cars, expensive vacations, and all the rest, at the expense of a good retirement account. You don't have to achieve the materialistic dreams that society deems important. Enjoy life, enjoy material pursuits (to a point), pursue your work dreams and goals, but be smart about the future. One day you will retire and you may want to do it sooner than later.   

‘Fake it until you make it’ (then what?)

I subscribe to a number of email publications having to do with the business world and its ever-fascinating opinions, buzzwords, mantras and current trends. Nothing too complicated; most articles debate the following types of issues: qualities of good leaders, how to break through the glass ceiling, is there a glass ceiling for women, have we achieved gender equality, how women should act in a male-dominated profession, and so on. The new mantra for women on the way up is apparently ‘Fake it until you make it’; this is proffered as a way for women to feel ok about the fact that there are a number of men in top-level positions who are not qualified for them, but since they act as though they are (they fake their competence and/or readiness), they get promoted whereas women don’t. So if men do it, it’s ok for women to do it too. This expression makes me cringe whenever I hear it uttered, at least in the way it’s currently used. It conflicts with nearly every moral principle I was taught since I was a young child. We were taught to be honest, forthright and not to lie. We were certainly not taught to ‘fake’ anything. Fakers were frowned upon; if you look up the word ‘faker’, some of the synonyms are liar, pretender, fraud, phony, pretender, and impostor. Sorry, but these are not the type of personality descriptions you want attached to you, not in the business world, and definitely not in the academic research world. We were taught to work hard at whatever course of study we chose to pursue, and in that way, we would achieve success in our chosen profession. And if our eventual goals were to be the boss or leader of a department, for example, we accepted that we had to earn that position; that it would not be handed to us in our twenties or early thirties without having earned it. And by earning it, I mean, working your way up from being a project and/or team leader with responsibility for one or two people, to a larger project with responsibility for a few more people, and so on. Slow but steady progress up over. In this way, you gained the necessary emotional intelligence as well as the professional qualifications necessary to assume a leadership position. So that perhaps after ten or fifteen years in the workforce (closer to thirty-five or forty years old), you could be considered qualified to lead a large team of people or even a department. At this point, there would be no doubt that you were qualified for the leadership position; there would be no need to ‘fake’ anything.

Nothing is worse than ‘feeling/knowing’ that you don’t measure up or don’t fit the criteria necessary to do a good job; I have felt that way once in my life, when I was elected student council president in my senior year of high school. I was totally unprepared for the job, naive, not a spontaneous idea-maker, and not particularly social. But I was the smartest student in my class, and that was enough to get me nominated. Enough people had faith in my abilities such that they voted for me. But I lacked faith in myself and my abilities, and I could not fake my way through that year. I cannot say that I failed at the job, but I did not succeed at it either. I walked around with a constant knot in my stomach, worrying about how lousy a job I was doing, about my lack of spontaneous creativity and ability to pull a team together with inspiring words. I do not remember that time as enjoyable; it was a stress I could have done without. I should have said no to the nomination, but I did not, and I don’t know why. Part of saying yes was out of a sense of duty. Many years later, I understand that this type of position was simply not a good fit for me; I did it, but found no joy in the job. Nothing is worse than feeling that the eyes of those you lead or those who look up to you are constantly upon you, waiting for you to slip up so they can say ‘I told you that you weren't good enough, smart enough, confident enough, etc.’ This is how you feel; the reality may be quite another story. Most people probably wish you well and don’t think much more about it. They’re certainly not overly-preoccupied with whether you succeed or fail; they have enough to do in their own lives. Nevertheless, the fact remains that I was not qualified for the job. Several years later, I experienced the opposite. I got a summer job that I mastered with ease; I was hired to ease the backlog of returned orders of pens and pencils whose logos were misspelled or wrong.  We were a group of about ten women, working in the returned-goods department; our jobs were to tackle the returns, figure out the mistakes, and send the orders on for re-processing. I loved this summer job. I got to work mostly alone (my preference in most jobs) on the tasks at hand—dealing with the processing of returned orders and the requisite associated paperwork. Once I learned the rudiments of the job (which forms to file and where they should get sent), it was clear sailing from thereon. It was a simple job, but one that instilled confidence because you knew what to do and when to do it, and you got the necessary feedback (good work, or work harder). The department head took notice of me when I managed to clear my desk of the hundreds of returns assigned to me within a few weeks as well as to motivate the ladies in my department to plow through the backlog and get it done. We hung up posters with the numbers of ‘how many returns down and how many to go’; that sort of thing. We made it and helped the company out of a real tight spot. At the end of the summer, I was offered a full-time job as leader of that department; I was nineteen years old. I would have reported to the man who noticed my work, and would have replaced the woman (in her mid-thirties) who had the position (they would have fired her and instated me). The job would have been a springboard to a career in business. But I did not feel that I was at all ready to lead a department at nineteen years of age; I had no real people skills in the sense of knowing how to deal with different personalities in the workplace. I was ‘book-smart’ but not ‘people-smart’. I am fairly sure that I would have been an unprepared and nervous leader, in short, not a good leader at that time. I chose rather to fulfill my degree in science, and ultimately chose research science as a profession. I did not feel like an impostor in my little summer job, but I might have felt like one had I said yes to taking on department leadership at that age. I don’t feel like an impostor in research either. My view is that you have to like the work involved, but also feel that you can master it. Additionally, you have to have bosses/leaders who give feedback and constructive advice, and who are honest with you about your chances of succeeding in that profession. You have to be able to trust their motives where your future is concerned. These types of people seem to be at a premium these days.

I know that this phrase arose as a way for employees, mostly women, to deal with and overcome feeling like impostors in their positions. The impostor syndrome seems to be widespread among highly-educated intelligent women from what I read; something that strikes me as quite irrational. But does faking feeling successful make you feel better about yourself when you feel like an impostor? Does it make you do a better job? And just because a number of men do this, do women need to do it? What I guess I am saying is that if you feel like an impostor in your job 100% of the time, perhaps your brain and heart are telling you something important that you should listen to—that maybe you’re in the wrong job or wrong profession. Nevertheless, I think we need to reevaluate this expression and stop using it to falsely bolster confidence, especially where women are concerned. Perhaps a better way to phrase it would be: ‘Visualize mastering what you work so hard at. Visualize succeeding at it. Visualize yourself doing it in your mind’s eye. Visualize your impact on those around you’. And if your mind’s eye cannot ‘see’ you doing it with a fairly high degree of confidence, rethink your goals. If you feel only dread and fear about being at the top or doing what it is you think is expected of you, is it worth it? There’s nothing worse than ‘arriving’, only to wonder, ‘what do I do now that I've arrived?’ ‘Making it’ is not a goal in and of itself, no matter how much ‘faking’ is involved; there has to be more substance to the goal. What do you want to do with the top position, and why? Do you want to help your company and your employees, or just promote yourself and your career? I think those questions are worth exploring and answering, and will go a long way toward making you feel like you have the right to be where you are, that you've earned that right, and that you go forward with confidence and the smarts necessary to do a good job. Because there are too many men in top positions who have no business being there; who are miserable leaders and who do not know how to listen or to communicate with their employees. These men have risen to the level of their incompetence, which in some cases is quite high within an organization. I don’t think we need more bad leaders in the form of women who are just like these men. I’m looking for real leadership, inspiring and competent leadership; I’ll take a truly-qualified, honest, humble man or woman over a faker any day.

Saying goodbye to loyalty in the workplace

A colleague and friend retired this past week after a long work life (forty years). As is often the case with employees who retire from my workplace, she will come in to work from time to time as a consultant to help with specific projects that require her expertise. At her retirement party, there were several speakers who commented on her expertise and her dedication to her work. But one speaker in particular commented on her loyalty to her workplace, her willingness to speak up when there were problems, and her desire to help make it a better workplace by speaking up, even if it put her in an unpopular position with management. He commented on the fact that the workplace doesn’t need and won’t function at all with only yes-men and yes-women, but rather with employees who are willing to speak up and to say no when necessary. In other words, such employees are willing to stick out their necks, to rise above the radar, to create discussion and debate when warranted and to take responsibility for their choices. They are willing to risk disagreements with management and to risk unpopularity with fellow colleagues who would rather they kept their mouths shut rather than create discord. You would think the workplace would encourage these sorts of behavior and would want to hire such people—people who open their mouths, tell the truth, and are honest, trustworthy and loyal. These are the people who are the backbone of an organization, who know it in and out, who know the history of a workplace (for better and for worse), and who can tell you how the system and infrastructure function. In other words, these types of employees are worth their weight in gold, in my opinion.

The opposite is true these days, that workplaces seem to only want yes-employees around them. It’s fairly simple to figure out--it makes life easier for everyone, especially management. But it may not be a smart management philosophy in the long run. There are several reasons for that, which the speaker above touched upon. He meant that it was necessary for employees to speak up in order to prevent a workplace from disintegrating, to prevent it from self-destruction. When I think about it what he said, it makes perfect sense. Unfortunately, there is too much of the opposite—employees who simply agree with the boss when asked their opinions about a specific issue. If you are asked your opinion, and the only thing that preoccupies you is figuring out what management’s stance would be so that you can parrot management’s ideas back to your boss, who will be pleased that you are in agreement with them, then you are a good employee, at least these days. To voice the dissenting opinion, to talk against a specific management philosophy or dictate, to relate the problems associated with the aforementioned, are death knells for your career advancement. If you are direct, honest, willing to debate and discuss, have a sense of an organization’s history, bring up problems, or otherwise ‘bother’ management, you are not valued, or not valued as highly as those who nod and agree with the boss. And of course from a boss’s perspective, the path of least resistance is to promote the employee who agrees with you and your business philosophies and strategies. I get it. I just don’t agree with it. And I cannot see how this makes for a healthy workplace. But I’m of the old school, and grew up during a time when honesty, directness and loyalty were valued.

Some types of managers will tell you the following when you bring up a problem that exists in a workplace: that you are too focused on how things were done in the past (when you bring up historical references for how that problem may have been dealt with previously), that you need to forget the past and focus on the here-and-now, or that you are too direct, or that what you bring up is really not a problem (even though it really is), to name a few responses. They like to talk a blue streak about conflict resolution and the rampant belief that all problems can be resolved; my answer to this is that not all problems can be resolved, just as not all people can truly get along, and in fact to believe so is remarkably naïve and possibly dangerous. Of course, if all employees simply nod their heads and ‘agree’ to a particular resolution, regardless of whether they agree with it or not, then ‘conflict resolution’ has been achieved. But it’s not honest resolution. In the long-run, this type of agreement is not healthy for an organization. Because the result is that dissension rather grows in the corridors. Employees talk about and against management’s philosophies and strategies instead of talking directly to management. There are a lot of rumors and gossip. Management for its part thinks that all employees are happy with the status quo, and so on, and are free to proceed with their plans. But there is a reason for why employees play the yes-men role: they are afraid for their jobs. If you are not in a protected position (where you cannot get fired, e.g. civil service jobs), you can find yourself without a job when the first round of budget cuts comes along. Because the name of the game now is to save as much money as possible—that is the current management strategy—and you put yourself first on the cut list if you are a ‘dissenter’.

It seems to me that loyalty is a dying virtue in the workplace in any case. There is no objectively good reason to be loyal to a workplace anymore, because that workplace will not be loyal to you in return, not in the age of budget cuts and streamlined efficiency. There is no contract between an employee and his or her workplace anymore, the way there seemed to be in my parents’ generation. The workplace has changed enormously during the past thirty years. It would be unrealistic to assume that it would not. The changes may be for the good in some ways; I am in a wait and see mode. There are certainly long-term employees who have abused their positions, just as there are companies that have abused their long-term employees. But at present, there does not seem to be much point in sticking around in one workplace for years anymore; in fact, it may be a liability to do so, unless you find a workplace that values loyalty. Younger people coming into the workplace at present know that their prospects of landing a permanent job (cannot be fired) in an organization are few to none. Companies will not offer such positions now; young people know this and know that they will be out of a job after four or five years, after they have fulfilled training courses or reached the limit in terms of how far they can progress in one position. There is thus no real point in getting too attached, too involved, too dedicated or too interested in what goes on in your workplace; you won’t be there for more than four or five years. You know you will be moving on. The workplaces of the future seem to be places where mutual utilization of each other will define how things are done. Loyalty will be reserved for the personal arena—loyalty to family and to friends. Perhaps this is the way it should be. But a part of me still feels that it should not be necessary to comment on an employee’s loyalty at the end of a long work life—that this type of loyalty should be more the rule than the exception. My guess is that the workplaces of the future will be defined by short-term employees working on short-term projects that are led by short-term managers; employees and bosses will be project-dedicated but not necessarily workplace-dedicated or workplace-loyal. They know they are dispensable, that they can be fired, replaced at will, or rehired, but also that they can move easily from one workplace to another, without the feeling of attachment that long-term workers often feel after many years in their workplaces. The white collar workplaces of the future will be more like factories—producing what they produce without much attention paid to those who are doing the producing. But in return, the employees will receive training and a good income, but no more. Expectations of career advancement within one company will taper off, especially if an employee reaches an income level that is non-sustainable for the company. It will be cheaper to hire younger workers without much experience. In this way, loyalty will be discouraged and eventually obliterated. A glum scenario, perhaps, or perhaps not. Time will tell.  

Brave new work world

It strikes me more and more that the work world has become a ’brave new world’. The future is now, is upon us. A myriad of changes sneaked up on us and suddenly were there. But they weren’t just small changes; they were life-changing and workplace-changing changes. Those of us who have been in the work world for a while are a bit more observant of these changes; or perhaps we feel the effects of this brave new world a bit more intensely than those just starting out. In any case, I’ve had the past two years to muse upon all of the changes, and I must say that they herald a new world of work that we can no longer deny has in reality arrived. 

Open landscapes, shared jobs, home offices, flexible time, team projects, and group thinking are just a few of those changes. But perhaps the biggest change in the past five years alone has been the move toward selling yourself as a worker. It is no longer possible to ignore this fact—that marketing yourself and your capabilities, selling yourself to a potential employer, has become de rigueur for average employees. It is no longer a matter of choice. Even headhunting agencies will tell you that now. It started with posting personal photos on resumes. That was never done when I was starting out in the work world; it is very common now. It moved on to the use of social media to establish your online presence; that has become very important. LinkedIn, Facebook, Google +, Twitter, and a myriad of other online social spaces help present you to a potential employer. The more hits you have on Google, the better. Of course they have to be the right kind of hits; it won’t do for an employer, potential or not, to find your drunken party photos on Facebook. But it strikes me that a potential employer might even overlook this if they see that you have a huge number of friends or followers. Because this is the age of networking. The more networks you have, the better. It shows presumably that you are a social person, friendly, capable of teamwork, of sharing, of listening, of communicating. It may be to your detriment not to have an online social presence these days. I cannot say for sure, but I have a very strong feeling that this is the case. And if it is, is this the right way to be doing things? It’s too soon to say, but for those people who are professionally competent yet introverted or even shy about ‘getting themselves out there’; it must be a nightmare to maneuver through this brave new world. How do you explain to a potential employer that you are fully competent to do the job but a bit shy about promoting yourself? And if your job doesn’t involve sales or marketing, why is it necessary to have to market yourself to an employer? Why isn’t an interview about your skills and competence enough to get you hired? But it’s not anymore. I think that some of this new emphasis on selling yourself is going to backfire. An employer may be impressed by a potential employee who has hundreds or thousands of friends on Facebook; the employer may even think that this means that if this person is hired that he or she will be good at teamwork and group thinking. But not all jobs need this or require it. It won’t do to hire a scientist with hundreds or thousands of friends on Facebook if he or she can’t survive the loneliness of lab life. The life of a scientist is often lonely. If you are hired as a scientist, it is expected that you can tolerate alone time—in your office writing articles or grants, or alone in the lab doing experiments until all hours of the evening. And being social online doesn’t necessarily translate to being a better communicator or better networker in the workplace. I’ve seen that more times than I can count.

I couldn’t even imagine how awful it must be to work in an open landscape, to not have my own office or even to share an office but to be able to close the door on the rest of the workplace at times. I cannot imagine what it must be like to talk on the phone with no hope of privacy whatsoever, whether it be a work-related or personal call. I couldn’t stand the idea that I was to be monitored at all times. I also don’t like the idea of shared jobs; I don’t think it is right to hire a person to do a job and then to hire one or two more people to do the same job, so that all of them are sharing that job at the same time. I can understand sharing a job if one person does it 50% of the time and the other person has the other 50%--I call that splitting a job. The trend that I have seen recently is that one or two people are working simultaneously on the same project or job and are mostly just competing with each other instead of working effectively. I don’t get it in any case. I know a few people who have complained to me about this—that they don’t have their individual projects in the lab but instead are working on the same project as a co-worker, or that they really don’t know what is expected of them, or they don’t know what they’re really doing. That sense of vagueness that hangs over everything—the veil of vagueness, I call it. Who is my boss, what is my job, what is expected of me, am I doing a good job, what is a good job? The same vagueness is involved in group thinking—is this really the way we want to go in the workplace? Forcing people to brainstorm together in the same room for hours at a time won’t necessarily lead to new creative ideas; it may rather lead to boredom and inertia. Home office days work for me, so that is a change I like personally, but I know many people who dread this because of the lack of structure and discipline that the workplace provides for them.

This has been a long post, but one that I have been thinking about for quite a while. I will be writing more about the brave new work world in future posts. I am figuring it out as I go along, but I must say I am ever so glad to be closer to the end of my work life than to the start of it. 

A super-duper uber work world

“One hundred academics at the University of Sydney, Australia, have this week been told they will lose their jobs for not publishing frequently enough. The move is part of wider cost-cutting plans designed to pay for new buildings and refurbishment to the university.”

This article appeared on the Nature News Blog this past Thursday (http://blogs.nature.com/news/2012/02/university-of-sydney-sackings-trigger-academic-backlash.html) and I have to say that it was one of the wilder things I’ve read this week--as in bizarre or very odd news. But I have a feeling this is shades of things to come globally. The university was quite blatant about its motives. They want to fire academics they deem to be non-productive in order to use the money saved to refurbish the university. If it wasn’t for the fact that this story was true, I would think it was an April Fools’ Day joke.

So we’re back to the good old question that is being fired more and more at academics and scientists these days. How can you be more productive? How can you rake in money for your universities? Can you patent your ideas and your inventions? If not, why not? How can you make your research patentable? How can the universities get huge returns on their investments (their academics)? My question is—how do you define productivity for a research scientist or for an academic in general? And who gets to define productivity? Administrators? Accountants? Other academics? Research directors and deans? What is poor productivity and what is optimal productivity? The University of Sydney defines optimal productivity as ‘at least four “research outputs” over the past three years’, and informed its non-productive academics (not just scientists) that their positions were being terminated because they hadn’t published this amount of articles. It’s a bit daunting to hear about a university doing this. Why? Because it is all part of the larger global trend to make everything more productive, without defining what productive means in the first place for each respective profession. I’m waiting for the powers-that-be to start on children and babies next. How can schoolchildren and babies be made productive? How can they earn money for the schools and child care centers they attend? And what about mothering? There is no real money involved in doing it, so isn’t this a non-productive job? But I digress.

I have to say that I am glad that I am closer to leaving the work world behind rather than to starting off in it. I know I have a good number of years to go before I can take early retirement, but I won’t mind leaving behind a work world that is focused solely on money and how to make more of it. There will never be enough money. Man’s nature is greedy. He will always want more. Enough is never enough. It’s boring really. I’ve written about the different management philosophies that have taken over the business world. They’re all about productivity, cost-effectiveness, and control of employees. The joy of working is disappearing. I want to say it is disappearing slowly, but it’s not. For some professions it is happening at a rapid rate. If every profession becomes like a factory, what good will that be to society? Couldn’t society get to a point where non-vocational learning and knowledge will be deemed useless and a waste of time and money? Where the study of art, literature, and music for the pure sake of learning will be considered a waste of time? Where turning out well-rounded individuals who appreciate beautiful things for their beauty and spiritual worth and not for their economic worth alone will be considered treasonous? We are fast becoming a work world comprised of super-duper uber organizers, controllers, bureaucrats, administrators, money-pushers and money-makers. These are the only types of jobs that seem to matter. I look ahead and I see a sterile world--an organized, cost-effective world, yes, but not necessarily a productive one. At least not how I define productive. And that will be the theme of a future post.