Canadian Government Executive - Volume 24 - Issue 06

Veto Point Project halted in meeting you were not invited to. Return to start. Uncontrolled Time False urgencies and arbitrary deadlines abound. Interruptions to high-concentration work require long periods to recover the train of thought. Meetings multiply on your schedule without your con- sent. Without fallow time to stop and think, there is no opportunity to ponder issues deeply. Sea-Gull Delegation New responsibilities are foisted on you without removing old ones. Everything is a treated as a priority so that nothing ever becomes one. Whenever someone higher up the chain of command drops by, they dump new work tasks on you and fly away from the mess, like a dive-bombing sea gull. Fad Surfing Flavour-of-the-month ideas get all the short-term attention, only to be supplanted by another fad soon enough. There is no follow- through, nor accountability for the shifting priorities. Yet when it comes time for you to show meaningful change, there is very little to show for all the effort. Fire Fighting Unanticipated urgencies cause a treadmill of mad scrambles. With no time to think ahead and build surge capacity, regular duties are neglected. Every “heroic save” is soon forgotten but the collateral damage lingers, yet every “dropped ball” undermines your reputation as a safe pair of hands. Resource Burden The contest for resources takes up time. Yet gaining funding and personnel does not come with the discretion to deploy them as you see fit. Spending and hiring come with plenty of hurdles. So even if lots of resources get thrown at your projects, the management burden can be overwhelming. Organizational Churn Your boss gets a new job else- where. Any hard-won goodwill that built up is reset to zero as a new executive takes over. The new boss is unwilling to be the custodian of a predecessor’s initiatives. Change duties are added to regular ones. Your previous hard work is dismantled. Managing Up Without empowered delegation, decisions are approved through a chain of authority with many potential veto points. It can be a struggle to get enough access to senior decision-makers to be influential. If new duties are continually tasked from on-high without enough “air cover” and decision latitude, the daily grind becomes little more than a hectic form of stage management. Managing Horizontally You are expected to work with counterparts across organizational siloes. At the same time, bureau- cratic systems obscure common ground with counterparts and add friction to working partnerships. NetworkingWidely Diffuse networks help get things done in complicated systems. They advance careers. Building networks requires a lot of socializing and face time. Social media can help but at the cost of new distractions. Managing Down Successive generations of employees demand more meaningful work and a sense of professional purpose. They are more willing to move to new jobs to fulfill career aspirations. All of that makes leadership more akin to serving staff, rather than the other way around. This is more time consuming and emotion- ally draining. Pick a Card Let’s Have a … WORK December 2018/January 2019// Canadian Government Executive / 17