Not the steps between the cafeteria and the break room, but in your responsibilities. The threads about firings and job reviews and hosebeast co-workers are all about what the other guy is doing wrong. How about you/us? Any deficiencies?
With me, it was refusing to ask for help. It’s like an admission of incompetence. I’ve worked at several places where other people left and I was given their job (or parts of it), and even if it meant coming in early, working late and weekends, giving up vacation days, etc., I wouldn’t ask for help.
I don’t do that anymore. It’s stupid on several levels.
My other problem area is with technological stuff. I’d learn as much as I needed to know about things like phone mail and the PC and the FAX and the copier, but nothing deeper.
I excuse that failure because I always had too much work to do, because of my other failure.
Where I fall down on my job is the fact that I literally fall down. I work in a museum, and my clumsiness is not an asset.
Thankfully, I have learned how to run into walls, fall down stairs and trip without dropping the artifact which I am carrying. There’s an art to it, I tell you. Once, I fell down a flight of twelve stairs holding a box, and landed at the bottom with the box still held aloft and unharmed.
Other than that, my flaw is that I need explicit instruction. You must tell me what to do and exactly how you want it done, for I do not dare to figure it out for myself. Not that I can’t-- it’s just that I’m afraid I may do it wrong, and in my business, if I clean something with the wrong chemical, or apply the number in the wrong place, it can do permanent damage. Luckily, my boss has the patience of a saint.
I need to work on my time management skills and prioritizing projects.
In my previous jobs, my work consisted largely of doing home visits with clients, so at any given time, the task in front of me was: drive to client, see client, drive to next client. When I did have “free” time, the priority was either making phone calls about clients or doing case notes.
These days, my clients come to me. I sit at a desk a lot of the time, and I have a computer right in front of me. I don’t have a lot of down time, but when I do, I need to decide what the best use of it is, and I don’t always make the right decision. It’s a new (but welcome) concept to me, for example, that I can allow my emails to accumulate and then answer them all between 3 and 4pm, for example, rather than constantly checking them and answering them as they come in. Same with other web-based projects I might have.
My other bugaboo is overscheduling, which makes the first problem more complicated, I think. It can happen that someone calls for an appointment and I have to schedule them 3 weeks out. People don’t really like that, and sometimes I find myself trying to squeeze them in here or there, and it really throws everything off. It’s great that I am seeing more people, but it allows for less preparation for each client, and that’s not helpful at all.
I guess “balance” describes my issues. How do I fall down on the job? Well, because I can’t balance very well!
I screw around and play on the internet too much. It’s a damn hardship, I tell ya. When the computer is in front of me it’s all I can do not to go online.
I’m at a new job as of last Wed. So far, so good. I’m just avoiding the internet completely.
My biggest problem where I am now is that my approach doesn’t always match what management wants. Most supervisors assume we all know what we’re doing, so they don’t give specific guidance. I know enough to know that certain taskings require specific formats. But I have no problem getting clarification, so there’s that. I do worry, tho, that my supervisors will think I’m asking questions that have very obvious answers.
On the other hand, I can retire in 4 years. It’s hard to sweat the small stuff in that situation.
At the radio station, I have certain areas of expertise. One thing I am not is a recording engineer. I do not know how to operate a recording studio mixing board or make multitrack recordings and mix them down to a finished stereo or mono project. Those skills were not in the job description, and I didn’t say I had any of them. But every now and then I have to pass on a project and give it to the kid who went to recording engineering school, who doesn’t know jack shit about radio (but works there anyway). And I don’t know how the ISDN unit works. Nobody’s ever explained it to me, and I’m not required to touch it. So on the day when there are no engineers in the building and a news guy has to do an interview by ISDN in five minutes, I’m scrambling all over the building, down in TV, trying to find somebody who knows how to make it work. There was no such thing as ISDN last time I worked in radio. Other than that, I’m usually the guy the rest of the folks come to for all things radio.
Recently, we were all given wireless phones at work. We are supposed to carry them at all times, so that we can be contacted at any time.
they suck–you can’t hear anything on them.
I had one inservice, 3 months prior to the arrival of the phone–I, and many others, cannot remember all the neat features we were inserviced on.
I loathe being interrupted in a pt’s room. IMO, this can lead to MORE errors (not to mention a break in confidentiality) with Dr X calling me about Mr Jones, but I’m in Mr Smith’s room…
So, I fall down when it comes to the damned phone. I also don’t work extra–but dont’ consider that a lack of meeting a standard–I consider that an act of self-kindness. I may come in extra d/t a crisis of some kind, but I do not do regulat overtime–I don’t think it’s safe.
I’m like that too, but not because I’m afraid of doing something wrong, I’m just terrible at thinking for myself. If you tell me exactly what to do, I will do it to the utmost of my abilities. It will be done fast and correct. Exactly how you told me to. But once I have to think on my own, we’re screwed, because then I start second guessing myself and then I ask questions ever damn five minutes, or if something’s not how it’s supposed to be.
You’d think me being in the military would I’d avoid that problem, but no. I picked one of the jobs that require independent thought. I’m having trouble, to say the least.
Oh, me too. I’ll do the fun, challenging stuff first and procrastinate about something tedious, or something that (to me) is a waste of resources. (I hated doing service awards. I never understood rewarding longevity for its own sake.)
monstro, I’m getting better, but I go to people at my own level first. They seem to appreciate being asked. Maybe because if I screw up, it’ll fall to them to fix it.
I sucked at some areas of management. I just can’t grasp two things-
Why some people just don’t do their jobs. You are an adult, why do I have to babysit you?
Also, don’t BLADE people. If you have screwed up, own up and let’s fix it, don’t try to blame someone else
I also like solving problems the quickest way possible. Some larger companies I have worked for don’t seem to like that very much. They would prefer to discuss everything in committee.
Delegating. I don’t trust people to do things the way I want them done, and usually it’s faster for me to just do them than to explain what I want.
I also used to have trouble asking for help, but that went away after a particularly large turd ploughed into an industrial-grade fan, largely as a result of me refusing to admit even to myself that I had too much to do…
I also have the delegating problem. I end up doing a lot of work I shouldn’t because it’s easier and faster than explaining it to someone else. My main problem though, is my bluntness. I say exactly what’s on my mind, and it never occurs to me to sweeten it or tone it down for “public consumption”. This isn’t always a bad thing - it’s given me a reputation as a plain speaker who can always be relyed upon to say what needs to be said, but as I work in HR it’s not always advantageous either!
It takes supreme effort on my part not to get “unhinged” when there’s 1001 things to do at once. In order for me to get anything done and get it done well, I have to hyperfocus. Not a good thing when speed is one of your industry’s paramount aspects :eek:
I’ve managed to work around this issue – with help from management – by being solely responsible for 1 or 2 major areas and only those areas. I’ll certainly help with the other stuff when necessary, but everyone knows now not to overload me.
My boss says I’m “very quiet” almost like I’m some kind of freak. True, I’m a pretty quiet guy and I tend to keep to myself. I’m not a big chit-chatter and I don’t toot my own horn often enough. This is not a good trait, apparently.
End of project documentation. I made the deadline. As far as anyone cares, it’s over. But now I have to generate and file all this documentation. Nobody reads this stuff. It never gets audited. It takes me forever. At least nowadays it can just sit on a hard drive somewhere and we don’t have to destroy a forest.
If I’m not in the grip of a deadline, or if a task is not critical (like having to learn some other function’s SOP), I tend to distract easily. Like now.
I lack ambition and a certain amount of passion, if you can call it that. I like my job, though. I do it well. I make enough money. The people I work with are nice. I like my 9-5 hours. My free time is all mine. Why mess with it?
I’ve gotten better with delegating. It’s not so hard if I can trust those whom I delegate to. Of course the entity that I easily trusted and could delegate to is being eliminated from the organization. My function is being eliminated as well, so some of the above ‘defects’ are coming back to haunt me.
I’m a follower, not a leader, and I don’t have much of an imagination. So I am in accounting/administration in general (relatively rote stuff based on established ideas) but have recently started a job where we all are unclear on how things will go (new system installation) and I am frightened of not knowing what questions to ask or how to get things done.
I can improve the efficiency and logic of an existing system fine, but ask for new creative ideas and I am not confident in them at all.
I am not built for office work…yet here I am in an office…So my entire presence here is one big fall. I just don’t care enough to do my job above the bare minimum.
I also have the strangest feeling like I might get let go today. Its really bizarre. I’m picking up some weird energy in the air. Since I KNOW that I don’t do my job all that well, I am paranoid about losing it.
