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Random Thursday: My workplace superpowers
Mar. 17th, 2016 07:15 amWhen I get one of Those Calls at work--the ones that say, "So…something came up and $HigherUp would like you to drop everything else and work on it"--it's amusing to figure out what they think they're getting by tapping me.
To be honest, sometimes the answer is along the lines of, "The original investigator is on vacation/out sick/unavailable and we need someone who can come up to speed five minutes ago and be comfortable finishing some fiddly bits and signing their name to someone else's investigation report." There's a time crunch (because if there weren't they'd just wait for the original investigator to return), but very little stress.
Sometimes the answer is, "This investigation is going to be Important and we don't want to risk assigning someone who hasn't ever done that level of investigation before." That's bunk, because if people are never assigned projects above the level of what they've done before, they'll never gain that experience. I'm always delighted when projects of this sort get assigned to someone else because I enjoy seeing other people develop the skill sets to do them. Not that I don't enjoy the big complex ones myself, but…share the love, you know?
Sometimes the answer is, "This involves a topic that you were involved in the last time it came up, so we wanted to save some time and not reinvent the wheel." With these, I always like to point out the value of retaining long-term employees who know what was going on in the company a decade ago, and who was working on things, and what the issues were. $Employer isn't always that good at retaining talent. I'm unusually non-ambitious (in part due to where I am in my career life-path) and they shouldn't count on that.
But the ones I like (such as this week's project that inspired this topic) are the investigations where they picked me because of my writing skills. Because I can take someone else's detail-overloaded, highly-technical, bogged-down-in-minutiae explanation, convert it into a summary that a future auditor can understand easily, and word it in a way that neither minimizes the issues nor inflames concern. Here's how it goes:
1. Reads up on incident description, procedures, and initial search of past similar issues.
2. Listens to two-hour explanation from subject matter experts.
3. More focused read of relevant documents.
4. Composes three paragraphs explaining problem, its context, and underlying causes.
5. Subject matter experts: "Uh, yeah, wow. So glad they put you on the job."
Folks: if you ever wondered whether superb writing skills can make you a decent living, I offer my career in evidence. Mind you, I wouldn't have the job in the first place without having the science background, and the writing wouldn't matter if I couldn't do the analytic parts, but what gets me those phone calls (and the implicit approval of $ImportantPeople) is the writing skills. It's worth it to work on them.
To be honest, sometimes the answer is along the lines of, "The original investigator is on vacation/out sick/unavailable and we need someone who can come up to speed five minutes ago and be comfortable finishing some fiddly bits and signing their name to someone else's investigation report." There's a time crunch (because if there weren't they'd just wait for the original investigator to return), but very little stress.
Sometimes the answer is, "This investigation is going to be Important and we don't want to risk assigning someone who hasn't ever done that level of investigation before." That's bunk, because if people are never assigned projects above the level of what they've done before, they'll never gain that experience. I'm always delighted when projects of this sort get assigned to someone else because I enjoy seeing other people develop the skill sets to do them. Not that I don't enjoy the big complex ones myself, but…share the love, you know?
Sometimes the answer is, "This involves a topic that you were involved in the last time it came up, so we wanted to save some time and not reinvent the wheel." With these, I always like to point out the value of retaining long-term employees who know what was going on in the company a decade ago, and who was working on things, and what the issues were. $Employer isn't always that good at retaining talent. I'm unusually non-ambitious (in part due to where I am in my career life-path) and they shouldn't count on that.
But the ones I like (such as this week's project that inspired this topic) are the investigations where they picked me because of my writing skills. Because I can take someone else's detail-overloaded, highly-technical, bogged-down-in-minutiae explanation, convert it into a summary that a future auditor can understand easily, and word it in a way that neither minimizes the issues nor inflames concern. Here's how it goes:
1. Reads up on incident description, procedures, and initial search of past similar issues.
2. Listens to two-hour explanation from subject matter experts.
3. More focused read of relevant documents.
4. Composes three paragraphs explaining problem, its context, and underlying causes.
5. Subject matter experts: "Uh, yeah, wow. So glad they put you on the job."
Folks: if you ever wondered whether superb writing skills can make you a decent living, I offer my career in evidence. Mind you, I wouldn't have the job in the first place without having the science background, and the writing wouldn't matter if I couldn't do the analytic parts, but what gets me those phone calls (and the implicit approval of $ImportantPeople) is the writing skills. It's worth it to work on them.
