It is the goal of most people to have a job that is rewarding, both in term of job satisfaction and one that affords a good standard of living.
It is good if you can acquire this job without going through stressful job interviews. It is also good, once you get hired, to move up in the organization.
Last month, I shared with you my personal experiences about getting hired without the necessity of going through the interview process. This month, I want to share with you my thoughts on the pluses and the minuses of moving up in the organization too quickly.
There are various reasons for moving up in an organization, some good and some not so good. Ideally, you would get promoted if you are capable and productive.
Some people feel they are unfairly passed up for promotions. There may be valid reasons not loyal, not cooperative, always late, etc. for being passed up but, of course, the one being passed up will never accept this reality. In the case of minorities, we may feel we are being discriminated.
Sometimes, however, we are promoted too quickly and I want to share with you the problems associated with this phenomenon.
When I went to work in the City of Evanston, I went there as the City Engineer. As such, I was the Department Head in charge of all the engineering associated with the infrastructure of the City. I was responsible for the planning, construction, maintenance and the acquisition of outside funding for the extraordinary initiatives beyond the routine projects.
I had no problems with this aspect of the job. What I did have problems with were, because I did not come up through the City organization, the activities related to dealing with the complaints of the residents of the City, the egos of the alderpersons of the City Council, the demands of the City Manager, and other idiosyncrasies of that City.
The old Korean proverb about staying alive, even in the grasp of a tiger, if you stay alert, was certainly true in my case, along with being lucky or blessed.
When I arrived in Evanston, there was a very capable man on the engineering staff who had been with the City quite a long time, and had been offered the job of City Engineer before it was offered to me. He had refused the job offer, and I wanted to know why.
During the first month on the job, I personally interviewed everyone on the staff. When it came time to interview the man who had refused the job, I asked him why he had turned the job down; after all, it was a pretty good job.
He was very honest with me; he said he had two reasons. The most important reason was that he enjoyed doing engineering work and thats what he wanted to do for the rest of his life, and the second reason was that he did not enjoy dealing with people and was pretty certain he would not be good at that.
I called him into my office a week later and made him a deal; the deal consisted of three parts. I offered him the job of Assistant City Engineer, which I cleared with the City Manager (the top Executive Officer of the City), and then assigned him the responsibility for all the engineering projects of the City, reserving only the final approval, by me, before implementation.
The third part of the deal was that I would free him to do what he like to do, and do what he was good at, by me doing everything else - which I considered management anyway.
With his responsibilities clarified, and with his security assured by me, he really did his job well. He also readily shared with me his knowledge about City government and the dealings with people that were necessary to effectively and efficiently run the Engineering Department.
The City Manager of Evanston was just a young man, but I learned from him a lot about management. The City maintained some state highways and was paid for doing so. State engineers would come to our City to inspect the roads we were maintaining for them before paying us.
The state engineers were my friends, people I knew when I was with the State, so I made it a routine practice to take them out for lunch before we started on the inspection. Somehow the City Manager found out that I had been paying from my own pocket.
One day he called me to his office to say that he was authorizing a personal expense account for me. I was flattered because this privilege was extended to only a few people. I did ask him, however, what the limitations were, and I still remember his answer. "Joe, there are no limitations. If I have to set a limit for you, you would not be given this expense account; it is only because I trust you to not abuse the privilege that you are given the expense account." I have used this line many times since.
My next job was with a national level engineering consulting firm. True, the jobs are related to engineering, but the difference between managing a municipal governmental organization and a profit oriented consulting business is like night and day.
Along with these differences are the types of people working in the two arenas. Whereas the engineers working in the governmental arena tend to be more cooperative and service oriented, the engineers working in the consulting arenas tend to be more of a specialist, career oriented and, in general, more selfish.
As the new Director of Transportation, having come from a governmental environment, I was thrown into another unfamiliar situation. But again, I was fortunate to find a way to overcome the difficulties.
Through a combination of being decisive in decision making, exhibiting competence in engineering matters and showing fairness not only to staff members but also to clients, slowly over time I earned their respect and trust and, eventually their cooperation in doing our jobs well and earning money for the company.
To help me during this difficult time was a young man, on my staff, who helped me tremendously with his unique knowledge of the consulting business. More than twenty years later, we are still the best of friends. Thankfully, in my current situation, there are things I can do for him.
One thing I never did get of hang of was playing golf with clients. To make the game more fun, we would bet dimes for winning holes. We would spend hundreds of dollars to entertain our clients but beat them out of dimes; according to veteran consultants, this wasnt too smart.
I left the Illinois Department of Transportation (IDOT) in 1970. At the time, I held the rank of Civil Engineer (CE) IV. My responsibility was that of a District Resident Engineer in charge of a single construction project.
When I returned to IDOT, in 1985, I was appointed as a Central Bureau Chief, a CE VIII position, an unheard of climb up the hierarchical ladder. Why I jumped up so far in rank is not the purpose of this article. The purpose is to talk about the difficulties I encountered, being promoted too quickly, and how I coped with the associated problems
Had I taken the standard route, and had taken the normal twenty or so years to advance up the ladder, I would have learned along the way what was required of the person in that position. But, because I was rushed up the ladder, I was not fully prepared to command full control, at least not in the beginning.
I was always fortunate in that someone or something happened that helped me to make the difficult transition without disastrous consequences. As an example, I was not knowledgeable enough about preparing a multi-million dollar Central Bureau budget.
Years earlier, I had a friend with whom I played softball and drank a lot of beer. We were part of a team that won the Chicago Grant Park Softball League championships three years in a row. We played once a week, and whether we won or lost, the whole team would go to a local tavern and drink well into the night. I wish you could all have drinking friends; they become your true, lifetime buddies.
One of those buddies, who had become the IDOT Central Bureau Chief of Budgets immediately recognized my problem and helped me with the preparation of my first budget; I was so relieved and so grateful.
Four years later, I again retired from IDOT. I was then appointed, by the Governor, as a member of the Illinois Pollution Control Board, a position coveted by hundreds of people.
Talk about a person ill-suited for a particular job, it was me. There are seven members on the Board and four of them were attorneys. Two others were university professors who taught environmental issues, who were long time board members, and then there was me.
Two of our major responsibilities, as Board Members, were: (1) to act in a quasi-legislative capacity when adopting state environmental regulations and (2) to act in a quasi-judicial capacity when adjudicating contested cases involving all environmental issues.
By law, each of the Board Members was assigned an attorney whose specialty is environmental law, to head the Board Members staff. Because the chairperson of the Board recognized that I would have difficulties, especially in the beginning, she assigned to me the attorney that served as her attorney-assistant. In effect, I had the best attorney , on the Board, to assist me with the analysis of the environmental laws and the interpretations of the cases brought before the Board for adjudication.
My attorney-assistant had a brilliant legal mind and, as a plus, had an aunt who was a state senator; which also was very helpful.
This is the story of my professional life. Contrary to the normal situation of discrimination that holds us back, because I was a member of the minority, I was quickly moved up the hierarchal ladder because of the demands of the society.
I could easily have become arrogant and think that I was moved up because I was so terrific. But I knew better; I knew that I was simply in the right place and at the right time.
If I did some things right, it would be the following: I knew that I had to be better than the next person to receive the same treatment as the other person. I did not see this as unfair; I accepted the challenge as reality. Also, I always prepared a successor to replace me, so that I would free to move up, and I always consciously looked for opportunities to move up to better opportunities.
Two things that always concerned me were that, (1) during the transition periods of learning my new jobs, what if I were not able to manage the demands of the new assignments and thereby totally destroy my reputation and credibility whereby I would never be considered for another move up the ladder, and (2) that my personal failures would adversely affect the public movements to advance the minority population of this country.
It is my fervent hope that, through my lifes journey, I have played a small role in the advancement of the minorities in the United States.