14 My time at DCF
DCF is an acronym for a governmental department at one of our fifty U.S. states. And while my non-disclosure agreement is more than over, I choose not to put fingers to the keyboard to spell it out or name names. IYKYK, as they say.
As I noted in this Part’s overview, in 2017 I left the Red Cross as an employee – in my mind, for greener pastures, so to speak – and the opportunity to be a leader at this state department’s office of emergency management.
Boy, was I wrong.
This is going to be a very short chapter – as my work tenure at DCF was also very short. As I said, I started in November of 2017 and was kicked out the door in January of 2020.
I believe I upset someone’s applecart.
Well, my position was ended. That was the official wording on my letter of disappointment. There are two types of state government jobs here in New Jersey: civil service and appointed. The first, you get to stay working in some other role, even if they don’t need you in that role. You can only be fired for cause. The second, well, they ask you to box up your personal items in 15 minutes and then escort you out the back door.
Yep, that happened to me in January of 2020. Yes, that January.
Suffice to say, I did not get much traction in leadership lessons applied from that short a tenure at a job – but I did learn some lessons from others:
- When one is working in state government – and maybe this applies to any governmental jobs – if you are not the lead dog, the view remains the same. Another way of saying this is to ‘keep you head down and don’t make any waves’. Friedrich Nietzsche said “And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.” That certainly describes my version of ‘question authority’ – which is something – unless you are the governor, mayor, president, etc. – you should not try to do if you want to keep your government job. It’s really quite sad, in my opinion. And can result in a disregard for humanitarianism.
- If your supervisor will not stand up for you – whether you did your job the best you could, or even if you made a ‘mistake’ in the eyes of others (see above), you get to learn a new word. A singular and rarely used, but very succinct ‘f’ word, which is:
feckless
adjective
ineffective; incompetent; futile:
feckless attempts to repair the plumbing.
having no sense of responsibility; indifferent; lazy.[1]
That’s about it. No other lessons learned. And no real chance at this job for leadership lessons applied.
All I learned, from a leadership perspective from my time at DCF can also be summed up in one word:
Bupkis.[2]
Even as I have now moved into a career timeline when I have been separated from that job longer than I was actually in that job, I still find myself grieving over how it ended.
Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’ five stages of denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance[3] still comes at me in waves – sometimes one or more aspects each and every week, even now years later. Do I regret sticking my neck out? Not keeping my head down? Candidly, while paying the bills, sometimes the answer is ‘yes’. Was keeping that job worth my pride, ethics, maybe even my soul? Nope.
There’s that saying about “when one door closes, another one opens” – well that is certainly the case for my own professional career. I was laid off from Chase in 2001 right after the worst terrorist attack on the United States and gravitated towards Emergency Management, and then in 2020 – right before the worst global pandemic in more than a century, found myself out of full-time employment in Emergency Management.
What did I do next?
