Finishing Well, Part 2

Starting a task that someone else finishes had a whole different meaning to me while working in corporate America. I was new to this big company and within a year, I moved to a completely new department doing things that were so new to me that before I knew it, I realized I had just changed career paths. My new job was a newly created position. When I realized what my days would consist of, it was laughable. The work wasn't hard at all, just different. At the end of every day, I would think, "This is it? This is all they want me to do? Do they realize I came from IT working on company-wide projects and that I was training incoming contractors?" In less than a month I was bored and felt like the job was a total mistake. There I was, sitting in my cubicle waiting for a "hotline" to ring and filing paperwork. Every so often, I would have to prepare the training room. That consisted of setting up the classroom the way the trainer's wanted it, making sure there were pens, markers, paper, flipboards and snacks available at the beginning and cleaning up the room at the end. It felt like a demotion and I wanted to go back to IT. To make matters worse, I clashed with one of the colleagues because she edited a document I was working on without my permission. Had she given me constructive criticism or walked me through changes she suggested, it would have felt more like a learning curve than an all-out ridicule of my lack of documentation skills. Out of frustration, I shared how I really felt about the new job. Wrong move. As we left the meeting room, she went to her cubicle and I went to mine only to see her drop her things off at her cubicle and make a beeline to the Director's cubicle. All I heard was, "I was just in a meeting with...". Yes, she went directly to our superior and told him everything I said. How do I know this? Because he asked to speak to me later that day. I wasn't in trouble. He was sincerely concerned and asked me to hold on and not to make any decisions about my job until he could get our new immediately supervisor in place. I never confided in that colleague again and it also taught me to keep my mouth shut.

My very first big project was creating a 2-week orientation for my division. I was on the project team because as one of two assistants, I needed to know how to accommodate the various classes for the entire orientation. I have to admit, I was kind of excited until I realized I would have no other part in the orientation. I don't know what I was expecting but seeing my other colleagues teaching classes while I was passing out paper and pens was not what I imagined. I knew I could do a lot more than that and frankly a lot better than some of them. The very thing I helped create, I was no part of. Ouch! It did not feel good and I was not mature enough to think it was me releasing the project to those who would make it better and greater.

The coming months were filled with answering a hotline, filing, and cleaning and organizing a mess of training materials that had gone ignored for years. Some messes were so old that no one in the department knew anything about it. I kept thinking, "How could people leave something in such a mess?" It wasn't impossible to do, just irritating and tedious. After finally getting things organized and labeled, I remember thinking, "This will make it easier for the next person that comes along." That thought stuck in my brain and I continued to work in that same fashion. Keep your files organized in such a way that if someone else had to take it over within a moments notice, they would be successful doing it.

Fast forward 6 years. I was promoted and had become the program manager for the orientation I helped to start. When my Team Leader assigned the program to me, I was not happy. No, I was angry. The program (to me) was a mess and I did not want to clean up someone else's mess. My task was to streamline the orientation and make it shorter. I was supposed to cut out the fluff, take the kinks out of some IT issues and utilize existing processes that were untapped. Almost all of the colleagues I started with were now gone and in 6 years our orientation had gone from 2 weeks to 1.5 days. I also realized that my Team Leader had more faith in my abilities than I did.

In less than 2 years, our department merged, our team was scattered and orientation was little more than computer-based courses. In the final days, I made sure all of the projects I was working on were accessible and updated, no matter what phase they were in, so they could easily be continued on by the next person. I started that department pretty rough, but I finished it well.