Can you handle change or do you blame others?
Recently I was working with a group of Irish people and as part of the session we looked at what changes they had experienced during their working lives. Usually in this part of the session the group come to the conclusion that change in working life is constant and this is going to continue.
In this particular group though, many people complained that it just was not fair, change was happening because too many immigrants were coming in and they were “too flexible” which meant they were taking Irish people’s jobs. So it was not a complaint about immigrants as such but a complaint about flexibility, their job requirements kept changing.
Blaming others and reducing your own skills
Then over Christmas I was chatting to an Irish clinical nurse manager (average salary €50,000) and when I asked her about her job, she told me that the biggest part of her job was rostering between 30 to 40 nurses. She spent most of her time assigning nurses to different departments which in this particular area worked five days a week from 9am to 5pm.
I expressed surprise that a highly paid medical professional was doing administrative work which could be done by a properly trained school leaver. (HSE average salary €30,000). Simply develop a chart which lists the nurses and their specialities down one column and the departments at a row at the top. If you wanted to get very efficient an excel spreadsheet would do the job.
However this nurse was adamant only someone with her skills could do this job. She said when the nurses strike took place, administrators took over and it was a disaster. Though she did accept that people had not been properly trained, she could not see that it was misusing her skills by spending so much time doing administrative work.
“Clerical staff did not have the motivation to get it right, they could not be trusted”
She’s reducing her own skills in medical care by spending so much time in administration and when inevitably the hospital management get round to recognising this, she will be less employable elsewhere. Maybe she might be at retirement age given the speed at which hospital managements move, when that change actually happens. However this hospital is facing severe cutbacks so the chance of saving €20,000 might mean they will move faster.
Only the flexible survive
We live in high-change times. As Charles Darwin said,
“It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the ones most responsive to change.
It’s human nature to resist change and to blame others, whether it’s immigrants or administrators.
However successful career managers take responsibility for their own careers and making sure their skills stay up to date. This means being constantly open to change and being flexible.
Keywords
career coach
career builder
career coaching
career guidance Ireland