Mad_Man

Today a big choice was made.  That was the decision on resigning from my job and going home.  I've been in Iraq for over 3 years and the time has worn me thin and my wife if tiring of the worries of watching the news and seeing the amount of death that is on the TV.  I have been struggling on the idea of staying here and continuing working for the great money, but for the last few times of going home it is harder and harder to leave to come back to work.  I can say that I am a bit nervous about going home to Uganda.  I have a few issues about citizenship, work, life and things of this nature.  How is it going to be living in a different country than the U.S.?  How is the work going to be?  Can I be as adaptable to the environment as I think I can?  These are questions that I need to answer.  But I am going to make it.  I am going to be with my wife and be successful.  I am starting to make arrangements and start making contacts to do what I need to.  So I have 3 months to do what I need to.  Wish me luck.

Have you ever heard the phrase "Too many chiefs and not enough Indians", this is the case of having no leadership structure in place in a working environment.  Everybody to some degree feels that they can do the job better and that the person that is in charge doesn't have a clue on what they are doing and should be part of the work force.  I know that i have in some cases the same mentality when it came to work that I was doing and I wasn't the boss.  When this happens, the whole operation suffers.

The hardest thing for anyone to do is to humble yourself and do what you are told and support your leadership, right or wrong but make sure that it is ethical.  I am currently dealing with this issue and feel that others can benefit from my experience.  I had a foreman that was working for me and just recently I went on my vacation.  I learned on my return that he is now my manager.  How does this guy skip supervisor position and become a manager?  How did I get passed up for the promotion?  How, how, how, why, why, why???????  Oh the resentment was there and is still here, what can I do but deal with the issues at hand.  The guy doesn't have the experience in the management area and hasn't developed the people skills to deal with issues at that level.  So what did I do, I went against the grain.  The internal politics of the work area was in full effect.  This caused distrust and now we are working against each other which means that the operation is suffering.  Every day instead of dealing with work, I am dealing with the he said this, he does that, why does he get away with this.  It makes me sick that I've let myself go this far into the petty bullshit and not being more mature to do what is write.

So I am making the changes that I know have to be made in order to succeed.  I am humbling myself and becoming a mentor to this new manager.  I am doing what needs to be done so that my manager learns how to be a manager and molding him into a big picture person.  The overall responsibility falls on him and I am going to do what it takes to help him.  But still . . . . .  I know, I know that I will learn what I want in a supervisor when I become a manager, but first I have to do what is expected of me and even some of what is not expected of me so that my leader shines, besides it's his time and my time will come.

I'm returning back to work from a 3 day conference and I can tell you, the dear readers of this bog, that I wish that I was spending my time washing an entire village's clothes.  I work in the field of logistics; shipping, receiving, storage, transportation, inventories, etc.  The conference was lead by so called Subject Matter Experts dealing with the departments in logistics.  So for myself, I understood the conference to be about standardization and how better communication through department heads could help with efficiency and common problems that the departments may have.  There are six cities that have the same operation as mine, but there is little to no communication between us.  So back to the conference,  my hopes were dashed when I arrived and found that it really had nothing to do with my department but was really about logistics as a whole and how the other departments are affected by our operations.  So it was a 360 degree change and was sadly disappointing.  I feel that in order to be in the position that most of the participants were in, we would have to know about logistics.  Sadly, the so called subject matter experts labored away with slide shows and briefings about the grand scheme of things.  I also found to my disappointment that these sad SMEs had little to no knowledge on our departments and could shed no light on our operation. These people are suppose to be the most experienced member of our work force.  I beg to differ on the meaning of Subject Matter Experts.  From what I've seen, they are just cronies that were put in a position just to suck money away from the operation a pretend that they know what they are talking about.  Although all of this sounds like . . . . MPs in Government.  A little Uganda while I am working, how nice.