Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

The title is the hallmark of a person in a bureaucracy. Do less; just get by.

I have worked in and around government agencies for four decades or more. Gosh, that’s a lot. The title of this little post summarizes the mean of the bell curve in these places. Let’s expand a bit.

Someone needs assistance. This is usually a junior government employee. This junior employee goes to a senior employee and describes a situation. The senior employee, quite accustomed to and skilled at doing less than they can, tells the junior employee, “You need to go see whats-his-name.”

What the senior employee could is say, “Whats-his-name is the person to see for this situation. Come on, lets both go see him right now and talk with him about this. It will take some time, but will save everyone much more time in the end and produce a better result.”

The second thing is the right thing to do. The first thing is less than the senior employee could do, but will get by and, if questioned later, would allow the senior person to tell even-more-senior persons that they did their job. You know, they gave a partially correct answer, but you get partial credit in bureaucracies.

No, this is passing the buck. Go see someone else. I am not interested in you, your situation, or the mission of this organization enough to get out of my chair and do more than the minimum.

Yes, there is some value in having the junior person, “learn how to do things on their own.” Still, it is lazy. We can do better.