Maybe I should come back to this questionnaire Debbie asked me to review, from her Al-Anon book, or I'll never get past the first question. So here's a shot at the second one:
Do you feel uncomfortable or draw a blank when asked what it is you really want?
It used to be the answer was Yes in all sorts of venues. I did not have the confidence to believe that I deserved to want what I wanted, so it was easier not to know what it was and to go along with whatever anybody else wanted to do instead.
It's less true now – in many respects a lot less true. The only reason I don't just flat out say No is that I'm still lousy at career planning. But I have come to believe (or at least I tell myself) that this is because my career isn't as important to me as ... well, as what? As daily life? What's that? What does it mean to say that my career isn't all that important to me, now that I'm no longer married (except legally), nor in a romantic relationship, nor do I have children living at home (most of the time)? If my career isn't important, just what the hell is?
Hmmm. OK, so maybe I still have some issues to work out on this front. But I'm better than I used to be.
I remember exactly how I started getting better, too. I was working a job almost twenty years ago – the same company where I met Debbie, but a couple years later. I had been promoted into my first managerial job, and it was time for annual reviews. I had no idea what I wanted to say. Now this company had a program that I liked very much, where new managers would be matched up with some existing manager as a mentor. So I went to my mentor and tried to explain my problem. I said that I knew what my people were actually doing, and I knew what I would have done if I held each of those jobs, but I didn't know what it was really fair to ask them to do and so I didn't know where the lines were. What were the standards?
She was about my age but in a totally different department (engineering), and she said, "I don't know what you mean. I don't have any trouble knowing what I want software engineers to do."
And it hit me. All my hesitation about evaluating these people came from back when I was in school, when my grades were always so much better than everybody else's that I forced myself to refuse to compare other people to me. I would find something nice to say about Fred or Sam or Max and then my evaluation would stop. I would never let myself get anywhere near saying, "Of course he's dull as ditch water," because I told myself that it just wasn't fair to use myself as a standard. It was towering arrogance disguised as cringing humility.
The thing is that this attitude makes no sense in the workplace. First, I wasn't being asked to evaluate my employees on their merits as human beings. The question was how well they met the requirements of the job. And that's the second point: it's not a popularity contest or a contest of grades ... because there is an objective standard. Each job requires that the person holding it actually do something. So the process of writing employee reviews really requires two steps: (1) figure out exactly what the job requires – in other words, what size are the gears on this cog and which other cogs is it supposed to connect with? and then (2) measure how closely the employee's performance meets those requirements. If I was as god-damned smart as I always pretended, I should have no problem doing this.
I sweated over those reviews. I spent more time on them than I ever have on any employee reviews since then. But I was satisfied with the results. One woman objected, "Yeah, everything you say is true but are you really gonna say those things in my permanent record?" (Yes I was.) Another came back with a two-page, single-spaced rebuttal to my claim that people found it hard to work with her – which was exactly what I had heard from several people independently. (She insisted that everyone loved her at her last company so they must love her here too.) But because I had spent the time to think it through, I could answer her. And the whole exercise gave me a tremendous confidence-boost. After that, in time after time when I normally would have fallen back into saying I didn't know what I wanted, I asked myself instead, "Really?" And if I waited just a minute, quietly, and listened to myself – if I reminded myself that there is actually nothing wrong with knowing what you want – I found that indeed I did have a preference and indeed I did really know what it was. All I had to do is listen for it.
Maybe that's the problem I have with career-planning. Whenever I ask myself what I really want out of a job, all I can hear is "I want a nap." As I say, there's probably still some work to do there. But I've gotten better.
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