Anytime I have worked at place for awhile, I come across a new employee (or intern) that is dead set on everything they learned in school. They have decided that what they learned in school is the golden standard and they’re coming in to teach everyone at work how to do it the right way. Well, I think most of us know that school and the workplace operate completely differently. Explaining that to them was always a hard position to be in. How do you balance their excitement for improving the work place with change management and budgets?
The first time this happened, she was an veterinary technician intern at our veterinary clinic. School had taught her very specific ways to do everything, however the veterinary industry is a place limited by budget and time. In school, you have the time you need, the resources needed to complete exactly what you need to. Or at least her school did. The other technicians were starting to get irritated by her and refused to listen. This led to some tough conversations with the intern. I didn’t want to discourage her from what she had learned from school. It’s valuable information, but not practical when triaging a board of patients.
There was a trade off, even though I had been in the industry for over 5 years, I recognized that there was a lot of things that I could learn from her. It wasn’t just about teaching her about the hospital. It’s hard when someone new comes in. Most people feel threatened by a new person coming in with knowledge. Nobody actually likes change, our instinct is to fight against it (at least at first). The earlier you recognize that you’re feeling threatened by the new person or by the change, the faster you can adapt and grow. If you deny it, you’ll be stuck where you are.
Another time that a new person came in it was an engineer directly out of school. His very first job. I had been at this job and project for over 6 years at this point. This time was a different struggle. First of all, about 3 months in, I realized he didn’t know who his supervisor was, he actually thought it was me. Every time he’d tell me something I’d ask if he told the engineering manager. I did this repeatedly, not realizing he was telling me because he thought I was who he reported to. Another time, I walked in him leading a discussion with the engineers on the project. They were creating a new application design and workflow changes. That had stepped over some boundaries with me, I sat and listened for a bit. Finally, I walked up and went over how our end users operated and the issues on why this wouldn’t work and the amount of work we were creating for the end users (we should be creating efficiency, not repetitive actions for no reasons). Neither of us were happy with how that conversation went.
So his golden standard, at some point he wanted to teach the engineering group, not just our team, about testing standards. He was proposing holding a session where he gave engineers guidance on testing standards and other engineering guidelines. First of all, I did what I usually did, have you spoken to the engineering manager about this? (This may have been the conversation that it finally clicked that I wasn’t his manager.) I also told him about the efforts that go on in the organization around this and asked if he had looked into joining them so he could work with them on this. He was opposed to this as he ‘knew’ the right way to handle this.
This conversation basically led me to having a bit of a rough conversation with him. We focused the discussion on change management and influence. It’s something not taught in school. I think most people would agree that if someone brand new came in and starting telling people who had been doing this job for 20+ years how to do this because it’s what they learned in school, they’ll be dismissed very quickly. People don’t like change and it takes time to make changes to workflows. You also can’t singlehandedly just walk into a place and make changes. Well I guess you can, but it’s probably not going to go over well. You have to grow your influence. Partner with people who have the same interests and grow from there. You may even pick up knowledge from them that you didn’t consider.
Golden standards learned in school are useful, but they do not provide a real world scenario to what needs to be done to be successful. There is more than one way to accomplish everything and finding that balance is key. I always found school to be good for providing a baseline understanding of the subject and how to learn more about it when needed.