Going Back
I awoke early again, 4 a.m., but for the first morning in nearly two weeks, it wasn’t the pain that woke me up — just the habit I’ve acquired of waking up early. I’ve been sitting here, writing and reading, for an hour and a half now, and just realized I haven’t felt pain, at all. Still a bit of discomfort, but the pain appears to be gone — at least, for now. Such a great feeling! For the second night in a row, I got better than four consecutive hours of sleep. I’d kind of forgotten what feeling rested felt like.
Interesting things occurred in my life while I’ve been somewhat consumed by this chronic pain over the past two weeks. First off, it gave me time to truly reflect about some things that I’d been too busy to spend much time in reflection about. I needed that reflection time.
My work situation had been difficult to get my mind around. While I loved some of the results of what I was doing — helping to lead a new initiative designed to make significant improvements to the experience of customers of this vast organization, to make it a “faster, easier, friendlier” experience — as my day-to-day role became clearer, I realized it wasn’t a role I particularly relished. It didn’t necessarily play to the strengths I’ve learned I possess as a leader. In fact, it played more to the anxiety I experience when I have to plan for a big meeting, where I am responsible for meeting logistics, especially if that planning involves anything to do with technology, where I have to depend on others who are not necessarily reliable or knowledgeable enough about the technology to successfully deploy it. Plus, these are not the kinds of thing that an executive normally, or even should, have to be dealing with. But, I didn’t have a team, per se, able to do this, so I had to. It had to get done.
The meetings were happening on a regular, recurring basis, and though, despite the technology woes, were achieving a level of success, and helping to achieve the desired result, the toll the angst of planning for these meetings was taking on my psyche hardly seemed worth it, to me. Work life had become a series of these anxious moments followed by the thrill of victory, followed by the gnashing of teeth over what could be done better, in what appeared would be an endless cycle, ad nauseum, that I really wanted no more parts of.
The way the whole thing was being run was maddening to me, as well. I thought I had been brought over to lend my leadership skills to organization building and people management, but that was being handled elsewhere, by people who weren’t very transparent, nor as effective as I would have been at it, while I had effectively been reduced to being a glorified meeting planner. At least that’s the way it felt to me.
Any attempts I made at getting answers to what was being done, organizationally, was met by dodgy non-answers that would have driven me crazy if I’d cared enough about it, which I had come to not care enough about. I don’t play games with these kinds of things, and if you need to, you’ll have to play with yourself, because I have no desire to play it with you. I’ll just focus on what I can do something about, and do that as well as I can. That’s what I was doing.
These were all things playing beneath the conscious level, that I was just too busy to even give any serious thought to. That’s what happens in a chaotic work environment. You don’t have time to think, while you’re constantly chasing the next thread of meaning or significance amidst the chaos, or planning the next in a never-ending series of significant meetings.
Another troubling dynamic was working with the visionary. Visionaries are great, when they’re plying their vision to a group and inspiring the masses to their vision. They can be maddening to work with, day in and day out, especially if the work involves successfully interpreting their vision into practical, workable application to the organization they are designed to transform.
That was the other role I saw myself as having — to try to nail down his vision in ways that could work in this organization. His days were chock-full of meetings with many among the masses, with very little time to sit down to capture the practical applicational aspects of said vision. It didn’t help that he had a natural disdain for the ways of government, the very things that I have spent 34 years dealing with, developing patience for, and cutting through the red tape of. If I had spent those years throwing my hands in the air, saying “how can I get anything done in this restrictive environment?”, the way he did every day, I would never have managed to accomplish a thing in those 34 years.
I have actually accomplished quite a bit. I had to learn to hang in there, work through the frustrations of it, and do the best I could with what I had to work with. His mission was to change all of it, so he didn’t approach it the way I always have. I had a hard time respecting that. Don’t get me wrong — I respected him, and his vision, a great deal. I learned a lot from him. I genuinely liked the man. But, it was difficult working with him, on a day to day basis. Extremely difficult.
During my time at home, healing from surgery, reflecting on all of this, I decided to have my retirement numbers run. As soon as I saw them, I was ready to go. Of course I was. I was in a situation that would have aged me well beyond my years, in no time flat, and wasn’t really feeling the purpose behind it all. It just didn’t feel worth it, to me. This week, I missed another of these big meetings I had had to plan. Oh, darn! While I hated putting it on the rest of the team to have to pull off, I didn’t mind not being there for it all. I hated those meetings.
The visionary texted me, and asked me to give him a call before the meeting. He had wanted to have the meeting face to face, but I had been out all week, so I called him. He told me that I was going to have to go back to my agency because they could no longer afford me on their budget. Actually, they hadn’t had to pay me for these 3 months at all — my agency had been paying my salary. Once the calendar struck 90 days, though, they would have had to start picking up the tab. They couldn’t afford it. It was just another one of the things that was supposed to have been handled by someone else, that never did, so I would have to go back.
I’m glad he did it by phone, so he couldn’t see me dancing as I received this news. “Hallelujia!” I thought. I was going back where I belonged. Back to a structured environment, back to a situation I’ve spent my entire career preparing myself to be successful in. Back to sanity. It was better than finding out I could retire and keep living where we live.
I made it in to work Thursday, and met with my old boss to learn what job I’d be going back to. I had told her, when I’d asked to come over to lend a hand to this initiative, that I felt I had done everything I could in the job I was in at the time, and was ready for new challenges. She had heard me, and she had a job lined up for me that was definitely going to be challenging, impactful, and one that clearly will play to my strengths. She did get to see me dance (figuratively, at least). I was so happy to be going back home to my agency. I wrapped my work in the initiative office up on Friday, found out where my new office will be, and moved my stuff over there — just like that! While I was sick, everything changed.
Life sure is interesting, sometimes.
