Life as a Staff: The Golden Years of My Career

I had privilege to be a young staff, junior analyst, or had other titles reflected the near-bottom position for 9 years with two highly structured organizations. It might seem too long for some fast-track people, but I believe I gained some indirect career benefit from this long ‘golden’ period.

Beginner’s luck

The very profound side was that I was in balance of having my adrenalin high for cracking new challenges and having people more lenient on me because I was still in my learning curve. The statement “I’m still learning” was like a mojo to me. I could do things wrongly. I could make mistakes. And I did, a lot of times. Some were severe and cost of hours of desperation in fixing them. But that was the upper limit of my responsibilities at that time. As a staff, I always said to myself that if some fishy things came up later after my work was checked by my managers then it couldn’t be my fault. I might be wrong, but it must had been somebody else’s (a.k.a. my boss’) fault, too.

After some time, I realized that a team was just as strong as its weakest members. It was the essence of a supply chain, as I reckoned it from my 101 college subject. Slowly I changed my view and attittude toward the quality of my work; some changes were forced by situation and some because I felt that it was the right thing to do. I started figuring out any alternatives before I gave up and asked for more direction. I began to understand the needs by listening more actively. I was gaining confidence to take initiatives. Since I was not coming with IT background, I thought it might be better to also build my strength in other fields I'm more passionate about, while trying to keep up with the information system's fast development.

I want to keep the beginner's luck which proven to be in my favor during my early years. But like the old wise man said, luck should be welcomed when it knocks on our door. And since I am the very owner of the key to that door, I may have to open and lengthen my ears a little more.  

More focus

Most of the time I worked independently and happily under supervision of some bosses I liked during my junior staff years. Thanks to them, I was pretty much able to handle and organize my work. I could focus on project or tasks without extensive involvement in managerial and reporting issues. It was a relief that I didn’t have to attend long-hour meetings, supervise other people’s works, handling difficult people I, and deal with unclear situation or office’s politics.

This honeymoon period lasted only about 2 years before I was encouraged to stretch my focus on other things beyond operational level tasks. I had no idea how it started, it just happened. Maybe my curiousity and eagerness turned into an “I’m available” board sign, hanging on my forehead. To be honest, it was not always fun. I was a little bit shy-ish and silent person so it was against my nature that I jumped into several different working groups or led something. SOP reviewer, change management assistant, risk officer, staff-development planner, and document drafter were some of my ‘extracurriculer’, in addition to my daily responsibilities.

Years later, those extra miles came back to me with benefits: knowing (nice and awesome) people, gaining more understanding of what happening outside my small cubicle, building networks and partnerships, getting better perspectives, and getting inspired by many talented people. Those sometimes-painful situation (mostly out of my plans) had slowly helped me reinventing and shaping myself.

Judge for a Day

Just like my ex boss once said to me, early years in our career gave us some time to have a sneak peak on what makes a good boss, manager, or leader. In my sight, a leader should be someone always smarter than me, wiser, more objective and dilligent, always in good mood, a great motivator, negotiator and decision-maker. Almost sounds like an angel at work, a boss in my day-dream will always be there to take precaution and remedial action to save our butts. Any boss with less than those standards were considered bad.

I enjoyed being a mean and horrible judge on people above my structural level. Lunches with co-workers and friends were filled with hot topics and critics on our bosses. Almost always, we claimed to be right and they, the bosses, were undoubtfully wrong.

But when I was challenged to live up to such high standard of great leaders, I admitted that noticing the shortcomings of a leader was so much easier than recognizing and implementing the effective ways to avoid myself from doing the same things. We, the youngsters, were not even fair when we set the expectation on our bosses. We wanted our bosses not to get mad when we mistyped 1,7billion dollar for 17billion dollar money on our organization’s letter to the national press. We expected our manager to stay calm (and then fix the problem silently by her/himself) when we made some blunder to our stakeholders. We were not honestly openhearted to feedback, critics, or even new challenges. We demanded too much while giving maybe not even half of our potential, only enough to fulfil our obligation. I almost felt sorry for every boss in the world that they always seemed to be the culprit of our stress and unhappiness.

Lucky me, I met several great leaders from whom I learned so much –both directly and indirectly. Not only I learned from them about the organization and its dynamics, I also got some clues about their vision and life values. Appeared to me that a leader faced his/her own challenge, too, so many times along the road. I tried very hard to escape from perfection-trap because a perfect person doesn’t exist. I learned to accept that they are also exposed to mistakes, insecurity, self-interests, and other things I thought they wouldn’t have. They are also human beings, just like we are. With that in mind, I opened my heart to see them as they are, to believe that no (true) winner wants to stand alone.

Oh, those 9 amazing years. 
I was happy as a staff. At that time, promotion to managerial level seemed so far and unpredictable that I couldn't expect it. Once or twice I was thinking about impossible kinds of reward and appreciation to replace the promotion, such as getting a long paid-holiday to Europe or a grant for a master degree majoring in Education (preferably in US).

But then the promotion 'happened' to me. It marked the end of my golden full-of-freedom days. That was the path I had to take, no matter how seriously I doubted myself if I could do it right.