Push and Shove

In May, my husband and I sat down and talked about the elephant in the room. I was miserable in my job, not because of what I was doing, but everything I couldn't do. Last January, I stepping into the Acting Chief Integrity and Compliance Officer role for Veteran's Health Administration. Six months later, I would leave Veterans Affairs completely. I'm never one to back down from a challenge, and I don't see my departure as doing so, instead it was realizing that when push came to shove, I deserved better than a system that handcuffed me and my team and where uninformed politicians believed demoralizing leaders would result in positive change.

Don't get me wrong, the system has been broken for far longer that most admit, but it doesn't mean that tearing it apart without understanding consequences is the solution. The VA and many other federal agencies will continue to operate, often buffering the impacts from the general public, because the majority of their workforce is wholly and unquestionably dedicated to their mission at hand. They will burn themselves out to the point of no return before they let things completely collapse - in spite of leadership - not because of it. So the public continues to think, 'well they never needed that much staff in the first place', or 'they must be lazy if they couldn't produce like this before'. Yes, there are people who have grown reliant on the system in which they work, but this exists everywhere, not just within the walls of a federal agency.

Now, hundreds of thousands of career federal employees find themselves making one of the biggest transitions of their lives. They are entering into a private sector world that was never prepared to support them. From adjusting resumes, to unlearning acronyms, to digesting entirely new profit generating practices, brilliant minds are finding themselves struggling to translate their vast knowledge in a way that everyone else will understand. We will perservere and in the end, I fully believe that the innovation and rebirth that will come from this chaos and commotion will bring us to a brighter place.

More than ever, organizations must lean into a new take on diversity, one where a variety of mindsets and experiences mesh to create a bold, new path into future service delivery. Leaders will need to simultaneously embrace and mitigate high velocity risks in order to sustain operations and capitalize on the availability of an unexpectedly robust workforce and the volatility of an unpredictable government.

NC Bulger Solutions may feel like a little bit of everything, but it reflects the most crucial lessons learned, experiences had, and outcomes realized because, when push came to shove, venturing into a world where I could serve honestly and authentically had the best, though intangible, return on investment I could have hoped for.