God, Maslow, and the US Census

Thursday last, I drove to work thinking that it was past time to do an update to my blog. I was going to name it “Lamentations” or something similar. I am feeling pretty down and have been for several weeks. I have been able to feel myself sliding more deeply into depression and my doctor and I have been trying to tweak my medications. Also, these old knees are causing me a lot of pain, creating a loss of sleep and the need for a cortisone shot. I am a supervisor in the Admin department of the local Census office. With about half an hour left of the Thursday work day, I found myself walking around in my department giving out a few pats to the back, kidding with some of our more quiet people, passing out some sympathy and understanding to a couple of our newer folks who had been a bit roughed up by my boss, and just generally trying to let individuals know that their contributions were valuable, that their presence was important and that, if they found a need to vent their feelings, they could safely come to me. I wanted at least my folks, the folks assigned to my area, if not the whole office, to leave for the day feeling pretty good about themselves and the work that they were doing. I felt pretty good about them and the work that they were doing and thought that I should share that feeling with them. I never did get around to updating my blog last Thursday. I slept well and enjoyed some pleasant dreams Thursday night. I woke Friday thinking that perhaps, since I seem to be pretty good at pouring oil on troubled waters and helping people to feel good about themselves, this was my gift and that God’s plan for me was to do just that at the Census office, a place where that gift seems to be at a premium. I drove in to work rethinking my blog and considering an update I would call “Blessed”, because I believe that I am blessed. I’m surprised that I couldn’t hear God laughing out loud. A bit of an aside… You all know about Abraham Maslow and his pyramid defining a hierarchy of human needs. According to Maslow, humans don’t worry about the next level of needs until they feel that the current level of needs is satisfied. I have never known want. I don’t worry about what I’m going to eat or what I’m going to wear or my personal safety. I leave that up to God. I do, however, appreciate a sincere “attaboy” as much as the next person. I need to feel appreciated and I need to know that I’m serving God as He would have me serve and doing it to the best of my ability. God has surely read Maslow and I am, after all, His child. Shouldn’t He understand this need? Didn’t He put that need in me? Back to my Friday morning story. I arrived at work feeling good, looking forward to a good day at work, to be followed by a weekend away at a B&B with my Sara. The world was a good place to be. If you’ve read previous entries in my blog, you know that serving God in the Census office wouldn’t be my choice, but I believed for the moment that I was being directed and that I would be able to do my very best until the office closes in September. I could not have been more wrong. By Friday evening, the job had beaten me up so badly that I didn’t have a single spare good word for anyone. Instead of leaving feeling like something had been accomplished, I left without the energy or the desire to speak a word to anyone, let alone a kind or encouraging word. All I wanted to do was to go home, pull the drapes, and cry. Had it not been for the planned trip that is exactly what I would have done. As it was, it took a couple of hours of riding, with Sara driving, singing along with an Oldies radio station, and a couple of glasses of wine before I began to even think I might be able to return to something approaching normalcy. The Census office has beaten me. If that is indeed where God wants me to serve, He’s just going to have to find someone else. I’m going to be looking for almost anything else to do and, as soon as I can find it, I’m leaving (help from any of you would be nice!) For many years, I was a good manager. I attribute this to the fact that I like almost all people as individuals, very much like and try to look after people who are working for me or who are my responsibility and, because of that, feel that they have always tried hard to take care of me. We “had each other’s back” as they say. My projects were generally successful because my folks wanted to make me successful. That isn’t the case where I am working now. Instead of working together trying to attain a common goal, the feeling is one of being chained below decks and being flogged to row faster, by our management. I definitely do not believe that these feelings are specific to me. For example, I seem to be involved in more than my share of training of new-hires at our office. I’m glad I’m not training them for battle. Policies are often bypassed for expediency. I’ve sent census employees out to do a day’s work without being allowed the time to train them to fill out their daily timesheet. Worrying about getting them paid in a timely manner is secondary to getting them out in the field counting bodies. I’ve had to set folks, who have been barely introduced to our software, at computers telling them to do their best entering data and to ask the person next to them for help if they needed it. Of course, interrupting someone working fast, to have them help with a problem, is frowned upon. Setting expectations beyond the level of training acquired seems to be a prevalent Catch-22 in our office. Because our management doesn’t seem to recognize the difference in “urgency” and “emergency”, there is never time to do a thing right, but always time to do it over. On Friday afternoon, after twice spending non-productive time, first waiting on a conference call that didn’t happen and then sitting through a conference call that wasn’t necessary, we were “flogged” to get a mass of census data entered. We were told that it HAD to be done by 5 P.M. At 4:45 P.M., it was decided that there were so many mistakes in the work, a fact I attribute almost exclusively to poor training, that it would need to be audited and corrected before being blessed by our management and forwarded to the regional office and that the task would have to wait until Monday to be completed after all. Immediately after that debacle, I tried to point out to a couple of my own managers that, had the power in the building failed Friday afternoon, the work would not have been done, some needed training might have taken place, and the job could possibly have been well accomplished in the same amount of time that it is going to take anyway. The response, completely ignoring the point that I was trying to make, was “Well, yes, but the power didn’t fail, did it?” What they don’t seem to have any grasp of is the fact that we, as managers have been the failures, not our employees. We spent time and resources on a task that wasn’t accomplished anyway and, in the process, wasted our even more valuable credibility with our employees. Even if they continue to be flogged, how hard are they going to work next time for management that they perceive to not have a clue about what’s going on? How long will persons respond to logic that says, if we run into a wall the first time we try to get something done, the best plan is to back up and force our folks to run faster and harder at the same wall? I have “run at the wall” of trying to get this point across to my own managers all of the times that I am able. I believe that I have to remove myself from the situation in order to protect my own mental health. As of today, Sunday, my old boss has been promoted. I am now working for a super fine person who happens to have very little knowledge of my area’s activities and responsibilities. Through no fault of their own, except the desire to keep a job, my new boss has been put into a position where failure looms major and success will go largely unappreciated, a familiar Census position to this person. These events make me pause to think about personal integrity. When I watch how people act toward each other, I often am convinced that, if integrity could be measured in drops, we would be hard pressed to fill a cup. In my own case, I fail miserably. I do pledge this however: I will have enough personal integrity that, in spite of my feelings toward the office in which I work, I will do everything within my power to make my new boss a success. No one will recognize it or even care except me, but isn’t that what makes integrity “personal”? Now, if I could just experience a “burning bush”!