Archive for October, 2011

In a recent training session on federal personnel systems with a government agency, participants kept venting their frustration about a “changing mission.”  I pushed back several times; surely the mission had not really changed, I asked?   Wasn’t it the methodology for pursuing that mission that kept changing, in response to budget and resource issues and political pressures?

They didn’t seem to agree.  But finally someone clarified the dilemma and the group agreed: We’ve lost sight of our mission, he said.  We’re not doing what we exist to do anymore.  We’re just reacting to the push and pull of an unhappy public and politicians under pressure to espouse inflexible party lines.

I had told them earlier about my recent experience with the hoarded white board markers and door stops.  I meant it as comic relief but they didn’t even crack a smile.  It’s simply their reality right now, and there’s nothing funny about it.

There’s nothing funny about our government agencies losing sight of their mission, either.  I’ve seen private sector organizations lose their mission and it’s hard to get it back.  Employees lose their passion for the work.  Managers lose their perspective about how to lead effectively.  Everyone bounces from crisis to crisis and it’s hard to remember why we’re here except that we need a paycheck.  Nothing good can come of this.  We need to quit bashing the government and figure out how to restore it to its mission, and that requires having intelligent dialogue rather than mouthing mindless partisan cliches.

I was facilitating a class for a group in interns in a defense-related federal agency this week, and when I arrived to set up the meeting room I couldn’t find a dry-erase marker anywhere in the room.  Finally my contact arrived from the training department and pulled a package of markers out of her pocket.  “Keep a close eye on these,” she said.  “We can’t buy any more right now, and we don’t know how long it will be.”

I promised to guard the markers with my life, and then asked about a door stop for the meeting room’s heavy hallway door.  She pulled a rubber door stop out of her pocket and admitted that she was forced to hoard those too.

The atmosphere in the public sector is tense right now, and it’s not just about door stops and markers.  It’s about jobs.  When we talk about cutting back government and focusing on job growth in the private sector, I think we often miss the point that cutting back government is about putting more people out of work.  And as a former human resource director from the private sector, I disagree that the private sector stimulates job growth better than the government.  Private sector jobs may pay better overall, but especially with small, start-up companies they are often jobs with rotten or no benefits packages and a very uncertain future.  Government jobs typically are stable, pay competitively, offer solid training and development opportunities, and have great benefits packages.

Newsweek columnist Paul Begala had an article a few weeks ago called I {heart} government: Why now is the time to defend big government , in which he laments the ludicrous nature of Rick Perry cutting funding for volunteer firefighters while wildfires rage throughout the state of Texas.

My best friend came to visit last weekend and she reminded me that we never write our goals anymore.  This is something we used to do at the end of every year; we’d sit down and write three to five goals each for the year, a mixture of personal and professional goals, and usually there would be one or two shared “adventure” goals, like “we’re going to climb such-and-such mountain.”  In fact, I remember one year we wrote our goals on New Year’s Day in the lobby of the Dik Dik hotel in Tanzania, just after coming down from the summit of Kilimanjaro.

We don’t do it anymore.  Pam said something a few years ago about how we never accomplished all our goals and maybe there were too many of them.  Is that why we quit doing it?  I can’t remember.

We had a moment of energy this weekend when Pam said, “If I have a goal this year, it has to have something to do with finding a new passion.  Something new to be truly engaged with.”  And that’s what I’ve been thinking too; it’s what I was talking about when I wrote Single white female seeking a new tribe recently.  Pam reminded me that it doesn’t start with finding the tribe; it starts with finding the thing the tribe is passionate about, and making it your passion.  Then the tribe grows around the engagement in whatever that thing is.

So Pam threw out an idea she was thinking about, to explore the world of yoga at a retreat in western Massachusetts she’d been looking at.  I had been thinking, similarly, about going to a fit woman retreat in Vermont.  I think the thing we’re both looking for is a place to network with other women and get inspired by new ideas.  Our friend Claudia was with us and she was interested too, so we looked at Pam’s yoga retreat and we looked at my fitness retreat and the bottom line is that we couldn’t find a weekend or a week that would work for all of us to go.

That’s the trouble with finding a new thing to be passionate about.  If you’re not really passionate about anything yet, but you’re just looking to try new things, you end up not putting in the necessary effort to make it happen, to make it fit in a busy schedule.

Maybe we’ll try again next year.