Curse of Promise

After an eight month hiatus, it seems appropriate to resume my blogging. I'm sure this bit of news will be greeted with much rejoicing amongst my faithful readers...right, okay, moving along. Being on Campus Crusade's staff means I live my life according to the academic calendar. With the start of the year looming just ahead, it bears mentioning that I received a promotion of sorts this past summer. It's a typical promotion, minus the bump up in salary or the bigger office or an assistant to handle my paperwork. No sign of personalized stationary or keys to the executive washroom. Also missing are the various forms of suck-up from underlings attempting to ingratiate themselves into my all-powerful good graces. This is a common thing, right?!?

I also don't have a title, but in this case, not having one is like going through the McDonald's drive thru at 2am and, upon receiving your order of Chicken McNuggets, you realize that they didn't include the sweet & sour sauce. At that point, you let out a cry of frustration and exclaim into the night, "Fuggeaboutit!". Why? Because you have more important issues to deal with...namely, the fact that masterminds over at the Golden Arches have replaced the dark meat nuggets of goodness and turned your beloved McNuggets into 20 pieces of all-white-meat blandness. As you can tell, it's crucial to maintain perspective in these situations.

Even without the title, my role functions like that of national director for Epic. People don't really want to call me that and, knowing me the way that I do, I can hardly blame them. But what my job lacks in clarity, it more than makes up in vision. I get excited every time I think about my job and I have an intense desire to do it well. I feel fortunate because on this point, I know that not everybody can say the same.

That leads me to my main idea (and title of this post). I had a conversation with a friend of mine, who works in Human Resources. An interesting observation that he made was that there is a tendency to look for those who are excelling in their given roles and, upon finding them, "promoting" them to something else. This tends to happen multiple times over, until the Promising One finds himself in a role that he is no longer best suited for. He may still do a credible job, working hard and producing results, but the role never feels quite right. Then it dawns on all involved that the Promising One was actually ideally suited for the job that he was in a few promotions ago! So, in effect, this person's promise/potential to do a job well was the catalyst that lead to a move away from what he did best. Ironic.

I don't want to find myself in a situation like that. So far, what I've shown to be most skilled at (in terms of my job) is simply getting promoted. I'd prefer that not to be the case. As far as goals for this year go, becoming competent and knowledgable in my role is definitely one of them.