Happy 5th Workiversary To Me!
There have been a few times in my life when I decided to do something and then, as the thing approached I thought “What have I done? This is too big and too scary and too hard and I’m totally not going to be able to handle this!”. Moving across the country to do a PhD. Play in a hockey game that lasts for 10 days. Do an MBA part-time while still working full-time. Accepting my current job. As it turned out, all of these were things that I could handle and are things of which, as it turns out, I’m extremely proud! It’s almost like being scared that I’ve bitten off more than I can chew is a sign that I’m about to do something awesome.
My job prior to my current job was fun and I learned a lot and I met some great people, some of whom I’m still good friends with (Hi Heather!). But after 5 years in that job, I’d hit a pay ceiling, I’d learned all that I could learn, and so I wasn’t feeling challenged any more. And then a co-worker of mine told me about a job posting she’d seen that she thought I might be interested in. It was a job doing the same type of work (evaluation in healthcare), but taking it to the next level. A leadership position where I’d get to run a team of evaluators to conduct an evaluation of a massive, multi-organization, multi-year project that has the chance to change the face of healthcare in the region. I was excited by the possibilities this job entailed, so I applied and I got the job. And a few days after I handed in my resignation at my old job I thought “Oh my god, what have I done? I know how to do my old job really well. But there’s so much I don’t know about this new job – I have to learn a whole new area of healthcare AND I’ll be the boss of people and that’s a whole new ballgame for me. What if I can’t do it?” What I should have realized then was, just like the PhD, just like the Longest Game, and just like my MBA, that fear was a sign of a great challenge and I’d shown over and over again that I can rise to a challenge.
The last five years have been really interesting. I’ve learned a tonne about health informatics, about applying complexity concepts to the evaluation of an ever changing project, about governance, about managing people, about managing data when you have a large group of people creating and using a huge dataset, and that’s not even getting into what I’ve learned in terms of the findings of the evaluation so far!
I’ve had the opportunity to collect data from 13 healthcare facilities and counting, I’ve built my team up from 2 to 11 evaluators (all of whom are pretty fantastic, I must say), and I’ve presented my work across Canada, as well as in the US and Australia.
And even after five years, I’m not bored. I honestly feel like we are just getting things rolling and we are improving our processes at every step, and I’m learning so much from all the amazing people on my team, and we are producing information that is actually getting used by decision makers. And there’s so much more still to come.
This is not to say that it’s been easy, or that I will be easy going forward. In a recent presentation I gave about the project at the Canadian Evaluation Society conference, I used this image to represent my experience:
I also often reference that MC Escher painting where the stairs are going up but also going down at the same time as representing what it’s like to work on the project I’m working on. (I can’t put the image here on the blog because I don’t have copyright permission, but here’s a link to the Wikipedia page on it where you can see the image)
But honestly, it’s kind of OK with me. The real world is messy and things don’t always work out how you planned them, but you learn a lot by going along for the ride.
Image sources:
- Fantasy sea monster posted on Pixabay by Barroa_Artworkswith a royalty-free license..
- Number 5 posted on Flickr by Steve Bowbrick with a Creative Commons licnese.
Cross posted on my other blog.
