I need limits!

When my email inbox size limit at work went from 100mb to unlimited something happened, I lost control of my inbox. Friday I opened my email an I noticed I had more than 7200 emails in my inbox. That's not even counting the hundreds in my sent box. The sent box is a good example of how I previously purged emails before the limitless inbox. I have a personal folder named "sent items" (creative, I know). That folder has thousands of sent emails because frankly, to conserve inbox space I just moved my sent items to a personal folder. So I may need an organization class.

After seeing that I had more than 7,000 emails saved, including more than 100 unread (hopefully those weren't important), I went on a mass purging. I deleted more than 1,000 emails in 30 minutes. I didn't bother to look at my current inbox space usage because I don't think it is a storage problem, just an unorganized mess of a problem!

Managers will often try to give their employees some slack in situations. Some people can't handle it and they need limits!!! Just ask me, but clearly don't email me.

Million Dollar IT Guy

Everybody knows how indispensable the "IT guy" is at work.  IT can mean a lot of different things.  To the professionals in the field it might mean a network security analyst or a programmer.  To the average bureaucrat it means printer repair man, password helper, and even "guy who loads the paper in the copier."  

Malcolm Gladwell is one of my favorite writers.  He is brief yet concise and somehow always manages to be entertaining.  Before all of his success writing books, he was just a writer for the New Yorker.  One of his best columns he wrote for the New Yorker was titled Million-Dollar Murray.  Basically, it tells the story of a homeless man in Reno.  Gladwell explains that between police and hospital coverage, society paid more than $1,000,000 to cover Murray's homelessness.  He did the math and realized it would be cheaper to hire a full-time social worker for the homeless man and to provide the him with a place to stay than it was to allow him to be homeless.  Homelessness, he declared, was cheaper to solve than to manage.  

So, where does the printer repair man IT expert fit in with Murray the homeless man?  

Well I overheard a co-worker who locked himself out of the network.  So of course the first person he goes to is our LAN expert.  Not surprising, the LAN guy couldn't help.  Although he is an "IT Guy," he was sadly, not the right kind.  But he did point him in the direction of the network help desk that assists with people who lock themselves out.  I listened to the co-worker and the network guy go back and forth for more than two hours trying to reset the password.  We'll call my co-worker Murray for this example.  I'm pretty sure this was not the first time he has locked himself out.  I'm pretty sure, because less than a week earlier, he did the exact same thing.  So Murray had easily spent about $300 of his own salary + another $300 of the network guy's time.  Considering he currently does this on a bi-weekly basis, I think it might be cheaper to hire a full-time employee to follow him around every day to make sure he doesn't forget his password!  He may not be a million-dollar Murray, but he is on his way!

...and young

I have a confession to make, I was in the military when I was younger. There, I said it. Nothing to fear, I'm not going to snap and lose it.  I don't own an arsenal of weapons that I keep loaded next to my bed because I have nightmares. And I don't self-medicate with beer and whiskey to try to calm down. Those are all examples of veteran stereotypes I've heard before.

My experience in the military was not something you'd see in theaters. I was never near combat, rarely handled a weapon, and half the people I worked with were civilians who probably spent their youth protesting against Vietnam. While my experience was not a typical Hollywood blockbuster, I think it was typical of most veterans experiences.

With the Obama administration's personnel changes, hiring veterans in government has become en vogue. So much so, that it isn't uncommon to hear managers complain they ONLY hire veterans (see the comments in this article and in this article).

With managers often convinced they need to only hire veterans, they often hire veterans quicker than they need to.  And when these hiring decisions are based on the damaged veteran stereotype, agencies are not always satisfied with the results.  If the manager is 55 years old and has never been in the military, he/she may have watched too much TV and assume all veterans are homeless and substance abusers.  "We might as well hire this guy!  He's just as bad off as they all are!"  Managers need to remember that the current Pathways hiring authority is a result of abuses of the FCIP program by managers in the recent past.

The problem that hiring managers and the general public suffer from is a lack of understanding about veterans.  It is easier to lump all veterans into the PTSD category than to actually get to know the person and discover that he was actually an Army programmer and has a Master's degree from one of the best engineering schools in the country.  Even when people mean well, they fall into the trap.  In this outstanding Wall Street Journal essay the author details his time in the Marines and his experiences after he returned home.  My favorite part is the moment an older woman started rubbing the author's back like he was a "startled horse in a thunderstorm."  People assume we're all damaged and need pity.  In this GovExec article the author provides a hypothetical meeting between a veteran and a presidential candidate.  She interviews seven people to get their opinion.  Only two of the seven didn't mention a topic related to PTSD, suicide, or mental health.  The problem with the type of article the author attempted is that she assumes all veterans are easily categorized into neat groups.  The truth is that some are conservative, some are liberal, and a lot are apathetic.  And not all of us are about to snap at any moment.

The best veteran-related article I've read is from a guy who doesn't fit any veteran stereotype.  He guest wrote a piece in the Village Voice in 2005.  If you hire people, and you don't know anything about veterans, just remember Mr. McNeil's line in his article: "One of the many wonderful things about the American military is that we usually end up successfully executing plans. Imagine driving from San Diego to Chicago with a map of Coney Island and ending up in the right place anyway."

Happy 4th of July!

The Hatfields, the McCoys, and the Admin Aides

Government employees' career arcs are often measured in decades. It is not entirely uncommon for a government employee to have the same coworkers for more than 20 years. That familiarity can breed esprit de corps, lifelong friendships, and of course bitter decade long feuds.

I worked with two women who refused to talk to each other because of a perceived slight that happened 7 years earlier. One felt that the other interfered with her attempts to flirt with the building security guard by also flirting with the security guard.  Both of these employees, and the security guard, were married at the time by the way.  One employee later went on to supervise the other during a time period in which they still refused to speak.  I'll have to remember to tag this blog entry under "productive" and "mature".

In a different office we had multiple teams and each team was assigned an admin aide.  The admin aide on my team refused to work with the admin aide assigned to a team with which we frequently worked.  I asked our admin aide why she disliked the other one so much.  Her answer was "oh, go ask her, she knows."  So I did. When I asked the other admin aide she loudly stated "I haven't liked her since she sat next to me in the old building and took the credit for all of my work."  I asked, "what old building?"  She told me it was the building where our department was assigned before I was hired...10 years earlier.

Before I am accused of only using gender specific examples, please allow me to share the story of *Barry and *Geoff (*not their real names).  These were two middle age guys who disliked another guy in the office so much, that they would be the poster children for modern anti-bullying efforts.  While the first two examples were people that would refuse to talk to each other like they were pre-teen school girls, these two guys treated the office like it was a junior high locker room (I'm not projecting my own experiences...).  They singled out the guy they didn't like and would encourage other co-workers to shut him out of office functions.  Not literally of course, but they would treat the lunch room like their own personal Forrest Gump bus.

So as the manager, and a decent human being, when I found out these two were picking on one of my employees I spoke to them individually. I went the route of the prisoners dilemma and they caved and each one fingered the other as the main instigator. After spouting off some rehearsed lines about how disappointed I was in them and how I expected an immediate change in behavior, I asked them both why they picked on the guy in the first place. They both said when the victim was hired he asked Barry's wife, who of course worked in the office too (tag under relationships), if she wanted to go out for dinner. He had no idea she was Barry's wife and apologized when she told him she was married. This had all happened 15 years before I got to the office.  This poor bastard was putting up with this for 15 years! Thank God we didn't work for the post office!

Can't we all just get along?

I am a bureaucrat that can actually say I worked as both a federal employee and a service industry worker. I may not have been actually refilling empty draft beer glasses, but my government job required me to interact with the public every day. Every. Single. Day.

I am no longer in a direct public service position but I will admit that I miss my interactions and my ability to serve the people who lived in my community.  Even if some of those same people fantasize about dressing up like they're in a call of duty game and spending two months on a federal property they've taken over to protest my overreach. The anti-government types tend to forget that when they're talking about "the government" they're usually referring to normal people like you and me.

I understand some people get frustrated by paying taxes, but I don't understand how demonizing every government employee helps your cause. In my last post I mentioned I came down with food poisoning. In the days that followed, I lost about five pounds. It worked, but it probably wasn't the best or most pleasant way of losing five pounds. So chill out militia folks, and find a better way to pay less in taxes without accusing your neighbor of trying to steal your land. Sure, it gets your point across, but it isn't the most pleasant way of doing so for anyone involved.

Memorial Day

As a veteran who spent his entire enlistment far far away from any combat, I have great appreciation for those who sacrificed much more than I can imagine. I meant to post this days ago but my battle with food poisoning got the best of me. Tomorrow I'll try for humor instead of poetry.

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.
-John McCrae

I don't trust people who don't like dogs, but I always trust dogs that don't like people

First of all, I'm going to admit, the title has nothing to do with the blog post -- I just like it.  It's one of those internet quotes that may or may not belong to Bill Murray but it's funnier if he did actually say it so I just go with it.

A fun fact about government employees is that 85% of federal employees actually work outside of D.C. A lot of government employees travel frequently for work. It's why hotels offer the "government rate" not the "Wal-Mart rate." I was one of those employees that traveled a lot.

I'm going to share a story of travel and communication. I was aware I would need to audit an office which required overnight travel. I became aware of this because our administrative assistant emailed me a copy of my hotel reservation. I needed to leave in three days. At no point did my boss tell me about this trip. So in my best passive-aggressive pouty behavior I pretended like I didn't see the email. The rest of the day I did my work, avoided my inbox like it was the zika virus, and went home.

The next morning my boss asked why I had not completed my travel authorization yet. I was still was needlessly grumpy about not being told I needed to go out of town in, now, 2 days. So of course I was mature and I answered "what authorization?"  She reminded me I needed to complete the authorization right away and left. Meanwhile she never actually mentioned that I was going to be traveling.  She also never caught on that my shock about an authorization might mean that I was never told about this trip.

The next day, now t-minus 1 day until the trip, a co-worker asked what time we should meet to drive to the other office.  I told her that I was not in charge of the trip so I didn't know what time we should meet (or that we were even going...).  She then informed me that I would be driving everybody.

So I'm already annoyed that nobody had the courtesy to tell me that we were even making this office visit.  Then I'm being told that I am going to be driving everybody in my car.  After muttering self-pitying phrases on my way to my desk I see an email from our admin aide.  "Why didn't you add the cost for mileage on your travel authorization?"

Due to poor communication I was basically living in the movie Office Space.  If you're not familiar with the movie, first of all I suggest you watch it immediately, the main character is named Peter Gibbons.  Peter Gibbons is not a happy employee.  I felt like Peter Gibbons.

Airing of Grievances and Feats of Strengths

This recent govexec article is fascinating.  Not only for the content of the article, but also for the comments.  It is pretty easy to recognize who is bargaining unit and who is not within a few seconds.  Especially the guy who says "unions have no place in public service."  I'm just guessing he isn't the local president.  He also probably doesn't spend a lot of time with the guy saying "it has everything to do with poor management."  So how did public service unions and managers get to the point of a Seinfeld inspired Festivus-styled airing of grievances in a comment section of an article?  

I do not know either poster I mentioned above, but I can probably safely assume they do not have the same perspective on union-management relations.  However, that does not mean they cannot work together and actually accomplish things.  Sometimes, management and the union may have different motives for their opinions but the opinions might actually be the same.  Take this article about the TSA for example.  AFGE wants to add 6,000 TSA screeners.  If I were a manager in an airport with 2-hour lines at the check-point, I'd probably appreciate a few more screeners too.  Of course, management will accuse the union of just trying to get more dues-paying members.

How does this tie into "don't manage like this" examples? I've worked with managers that will spend more time composing an email to the local union rep sitting five feet away than actually talking to the person.  Call me old fashioned, but I think everybody can agree that context can be misinterpreted when reading an email.  Especially an email to/from somebody when you're already questioning that person's motivation for even sending the email in the first place.  I had a co-worker email back-and-forth with a union rep for over 15 minutes about the arrival time of an employee that was a few minutes late for work.  And each email got more and more argumentative.  Email is not only impersonal it also makes it easier for the sender to be a jerk.  Unless you're a total sociopath, it should be difficult to be rude to somebody in person.  That's why it is so easy to hang up on a telemarketer but so difficult to try to explain to the Salvation Army bell ringer why you don't have change for him.  

I know there is a manager out there reading this saying "Hey, why not point out what the union rep is doing wrong?"  Well this blog isn't called "How to be a better union rep".  It's call Don't Manage Like This!  Besides manager out there reading this, if you weren't so defensive maybe you would have a better relationship with your union representatives.  I would love to think that managers are always correct but based on my experiences, I am not actually myopic enough to believe that.

I think I've worked with him before

So I said I wouldn't use this blog to perpetuate stereotypes of government employees...some stereotypes are just too good not to perpetuate:

I'm also impressed by Flash's tie.  He clearly is an old-school government employee!

Twitter

Follow me on Twitter @governmentMGR to receive updates when a new blog is posted. I'll also try to write some micro blogs with management stories in 140 characters or less. Who am I kidding, bureaucrats can't be concise!

Gargoyles vs. Concierges

I had a foreign language requirement in college so I enrolled in a German 101 class. German was not as popular as some of the other languages in the university so the department was fairly intimate. After having the same professor for German 101 and 102, I decided I would like to continue my German studies because he was really that great of a professor. He often would grade a little easier than he needed, he would grant extensions for questionable excuses, and he would always go out of his way to ask about life outside of his classroom. I asked him after a German 201 class about his willingness to be so helpful to his students. He replied that most people are either gatekeepers or doormen. He went on to explain that a gatekeeper will force you to run through a gauntlet to get ahead, deservedly so or not. Often the gatekeeper had a poor experience to get where he is at so he feels the need to make you suffer as well. In contrast, the doorman is there to open a door for you and to help you go through. A doorman does this because he realizes that he didn't get to where he was at on his own. And to pay back those who helped him, he pays it forward to the next person coming along. My German professor explained that he tries to always be a doorman.

As I've explained in previous posts, most of us have toiled under bad leadership at some point.  But that is no reason to be a bad manager when it is your turn. Don't be a gatekeeper. Job security is one of the benefits to government employment. I mean, it can be damn near impossible to get rid of us! But that also leads to stale management that swears that it took them 25 years to get promoted and they had to kayak across the Potomac to get to work before the metro made it easy for today's lazy gen-xers millennials! So instead of opening doors to help people walk through them, they turn into scary gargoyles and try to punish you for daring to try to advance.

My German professor went on to explain that he knew I would never be very good at German, but he also knew I was just taking his class as a means to an end. Rather than being unnecessarily difficult he made sure that I took his class seriously and held open the door for me and thousands of grateful students.

So be the doorman, you'll be a better manager and you'll get to wear a cooler hat too.

Christmas in May

Many government employees, like private-sector employees, are very generous in their communities.  One office I worked in was especially giving during the Christmas season.  Long before I arrived in the office, employees would 'adopt' a family and provide presents for needy children and adults.  Sounds great, right?  What would be interesting about a blog post about a giving tree?  Keep reading...

In early December, my manager gathered his management team and we discussed the upcoming holidays.  We talked about granting leave, the office pot-luck, and of course, the office giving tree.  One supervisor has always gravitated towards leading the giving tree campaign.  Our manager was new so he asked us how it worked.  The supervisor explained that she normally emails the office asking if any employees know of any needy families.  She went on to explain that one employee's husband manages a non-profit agency for homeless veterans so the employee nominated some families served by her husband.  You might think, "oh that seems a little bit borderline inappropriate."  But I'm just getting started!  So the supervisor continued to explain that one employee nominated his daughter who ran into some hard times.  I'm still not done.  She ended by letting us know that one employee nominated herself.

This was my first experience with the giving tree project in our office so my head was about to burst.  Our manager was in a similar state of shock and asked if the other employees were aware they were donating to a co-worker's husband's clients, a co-worker's child, or directly to a co-worker.  Nobody was sure, but the supervisor said she made sure it was all anonymous.

I finally spoke up and asked if people realized that we could not go forward with this bizarre plan.  The manager, who I thought was on my side, said he agreed.  BUT...he added that it was too late in the season to change the program this year so he just was going to wash his hands of it and turn it over to the supervisor and he specifically asked not to be informed about the project anymore.

So to summarize, we had employees who saw nothing wrong with taking handouts from their co-workers who thought they were donating to needy families in the community (they technically were I guess).  We also had a management official who saw nothing wrong with this process for years.  And we had a manger who decided his official course of action was official plausible deniability.  I was not innocent in the entire process either.  Perhaps I could have done more to stop the event but instead I just sat back and enjoyed my egg nog.

Benefit of working for an idiot

There is a common misconception  that government jobs have more benefits than the average job. It is true that we have generous leave policies and a pension.  However we also are at the whim of elected officials who use us as pawns to make a point or curry favor with their constituents . One thing that we have in common with private sector jobs is that we all have to work for idiots once and a while.

The government can be behind the times when it comes to technology. Yes, the same bureaucracy that can develop stealth fighter jets and the Internet sometimes uses systems built in the 80s.  Teleworking has been popular in the private sector for a long time. The government is slowly adopting telework as a way to save money and increase retention. The problem with telework in the public sector...upper level managers don't comprehend it. 

A coworker of mine teleworks every Friday. I'm not going to lie, I'm pretty sure his tele"work" mostly consists of comparing the Kindle fire stick to the Roku stick.  But he is able to somehow get all of his work done despite the distractions.  However, at the end of each telework day, he is required to write a breakdown of what he did all day. Not an overview, a quarter hour detailed list of accomplishments. So each week he emails his manager at about 4:30pm and from 4:15-4:30 he writes "drafted email to you." When he checked his email last Monday his boss had replied to him and it said "I believe you're spending too much time on the email summaries each week." To which my friend simply replied "I agree." Luckily for him, he works for an idiot and she had no idea that he was making fun of her.  

A perfect 3.0 GPA!

The public sector and private sector do not always have a lot in common. But one of the things us bureaucrats share with our private sector brethren are horrible performance appraisals.  Not an actual bad review, a bad review system.  A system that is so bad it makes you feel like this.

At some point in our careers we have all been subject to an arbitrary numerical grading system for our employment appraisals.  One agency I worked at had a 0-9 scale but only graded on odd numbers. I'm assuming some consultant told an HR executive that odd numbers were more gentle.

For example, you could get two 9's and two 7's so your appraisal would be an 8.0. But you couldn't get an 8 in a category.  But you also couldn't get a 9 because your boss never got one and he says nobody is perfect. So he won't give you a 9 even though your coworkers on a different team got a 9.0 overall rating because their boss isn't a vindictive gatekeeper. You also can't get a 1 because that means you're basically being fired. And you can't get a 3 because that means you need a performance plan and no manager wants to go through with that. So everybody is a 6.0. Sure you might have an all-star that gets a 6.5 or a real brown-noser who can get a whopping 7.0, but for the most part, we're all solid sixes...on a 1-9 scale...that doesn't actually use even numbers.

So you're the victim of an appraisal system that goes from 1-9 de jure but in fact is more like 5-7. And managers convince themselves that this makes sense. They won't push back against their anti 9.0 manager so they issue appraisals to their employees and remind them that a 6.0 is actually really good.

I had a manager tell me I couldn't rate an employee as a 9.0 because the employee didn't walk on water. I reminded my boss that I didn't see anything in the position description that suggested divinity was a requirement. The manager went on and on about how her boss would never believe somebody could be a solid 9.0! If Shaq becomes commissioner of the NBA and eliminates free-throws because he couldn't make them, it would make more sense than a numerical rating that doesn't allow ratings at the top or bottom end.

So for managers at all levels of an organization, remember that you have excellent employees and let them know that in an appraisal.  And fight back against your boss that tells you that you're not allowed to.  Then, at the end of the appraisal period when you receive your 6.0 rating from your supervisor, smile while you mutter something under your breath about how you know that you are at least a 6.5.

Sounds of Silence - Leadership Development Training

Early on in my career I participated in an agency-wide leadership development training program. This training also served as an orientation for bright shiny new government leaders. About 25 of us participated in the two week session.

Despite the agency having numerous important (expensive) senior executives, the agency contracted the training to a few third-party (expensive) vendors.  One vendor was responsible for the first week of training.  This particular firm had 3 employees/trainers: an older man, his son, and his nephew. The nephew seemed to be the only one that had any sort of leadership experience (or work experience). The son had a lot of experience working for his dad.  And the dad had a lot of experience getting to know important senior executives that make decisions on whom to hire for leadership development programs.

By day 4, all of us future leaders had gotten to know each other and developed a good rapport.  We arrived at 9:00am for the training, took our seats, and the three trainers entered the room and stood behind us.  As we all became silent and looked at the trainers, they continued to stand there and do absolutely nothing.  I was not sure what to expect: a speech, a dance routine, or a clip of the first 21 minutes of Saving Private Ryan which was supposed to represent the battles we would soon be facing as bureaucrats (that would come the next day).  But the three relatives leadership experts stood their ground.  They did not say a word.  Now, we were a smart group, future leaders and all.  So people started asking questions.  "Should we be doing something?"  "Was there an assignment we missed?" "Are you okay?"  Nothing.  I started to estimate the amount of money the agency was spending in salaries for us to sit in silence (about $13/minute just for the salaries of the government employees...I don't have any idea how much the trainers were earning during this profound lesson).  Eventually, somebody suggested that they must be trying to teach a lesson, we just needed to figure out what it was.

People started to emerge as leaders of this Lord of the Flies experience.  I started to emerge as the indifferent guy who wished he had internet reception.  One guy wanted us all to brainstorm possible lessons to be learned.  He drew a word cloud with the suggestions.  A woman suggested that we try to trick the trainers into spilling the beans by asking them casual questions before slipping in questions that might help us figure out what the &#*@ we were supposed to be doing.  We took a vote using the ideas in the first guy's word cloud.  There were (sadly) not that many abstentions.  The group eventually decided that it must be a lesson on how people rise to the occasion and become leaders in difficult situations.  We asked the trainers if that was correct.  No response.  To up the anti, we agreed to vote on a leader from our group that could negotiate with the trainers.  We picked Mr. Word Cloud.  He approached the trio of relatives but they remained stoic.  Various levels of this went on for four hours until it was time for lunch.  We all ate lunch together and tried to understand what was going on.  Less hungry, but just as confused, we returned to the training room.  I was pretty sure when we got back the patriarch of the trainers would tell us what the point of the morning was.  Nope.  They were sitting in the same spot and still were not talking.

Finally, about five and a half hours into the ordeal (and $4,300 in salaries down the drain), the older man got up and said he was putting a stop to the project.  He then went on to tell us he was indeed testing us.  Then he asked how we all felt.  People generally agreed that "confused" was the most common feeling (for me it was bored, annoyed, and frustrated I didn't have a better internet connection).  The trainer told us he had conducted this exercise frequently in the past, sometimes it would go on for days, but we could not handle it well enough for him to keep going.  He told us it was okay to be emotional and sad.  My eyebrows started moving like The Rock's

and I looked around to see if anybody else was buying this.  A few people said they did get a little choked up over the ordeal.  You did??? When??  I still keep in touch with some of the people from the training, but not anybody who admitted tears about this training.  Most of us believe that the training vendor clearly forgot to plan for a day and thought "hey what if we just don't say anything and see what happens!"

So if you ever plan a leadership training session make sure you follow the steps below:
1. Don't hire a company where all of the employees have the same last name.
2. Don't hire a company that has "Silence" as a significant part of the agenda.

The Tax Collectors and the Prostitutes

Demagoguery directed at bureaucrats is not new.  From Rush Limbough to the Bible, government workers are not always held in high esteem.  The purpose of my blog is not to advance the narrative that government employees are bad, lazy, overpaid leeches.  However, I will give you real life examples of poor leadership.  There are all kinds of books, speakers, and yes, blogs, that will tell you how to manage.  I will specifically give you examples of how NOT to manage.

I hope to provide an interesting and humorous perspective into life on the inside of government management.  Follow along for stories about Christmas community fund raisers gone awry, the definition of retired-on-duty, and many more!