Always the quiet ones

Kris

If this is the first article you’re looking at, I suggest you instead read them in posted-chronological order. Which is also canon order, timeline order, and even the insider Author’s recommended order. There may be an alternate fan-list order, but I’m not aware of it.

One key thing about Competent people is that they will show up in all sorts of unexpected places. For people who could do just about anything, some of the things they choose is not what others might. Be open to finding them in all sorts of roles.

One person I worked with at UNC-TV had a job that gets overlooked more than it ought to. Think about the people who make payroll happen. Consider the traits they need in order to do this well. Of all of the business functions, everyone agrees that Payroll must be done well. But it’s not easy, it’s complicated. Payroll is hemmed-in with constraints. Rigid and unforgiving timelines. Immense quantities of essential detail. Requirements. Files. Numbers. All relying on every single person at an organization to do timely tasks in order to create the information needed for payroll to occur. You should look more closely at the folks who do that work. I bet you’ll dig out some hidden gems. But you will never know one as entirely Competent as Kris. 

To do almost any job well, you have to know enough about adjacent jobs to work effectively with the people doing them. Or to be a kind of puppeteer when those adjacent people aren’t good at what they’re supposed to be doing.

For example, our Payroll was part of Finance, and while Kris always protested that she was not an Accountant, for a not-Accountant she knew a whole lot about accounting. Payroll also is IT, but usually not in IT. One of the first parts of any business to become dependent on computers was actually payroll. Way back in the day. Funny story, my mother, who you read about earlier, warned me when it looked as if I might be headed down her career path into IT management…”never do payroll.”  Sage advice I’ve followed to this day as an IT person.

Kris knew our payroll systems inside and out. Sometimes when you’re in IT you get calls from a user who seems to be reaching through the phone to type through your hands to fix problems. They aren’t the IT person, and they aren’t the arrogant twits who waste your time telling you your business. They’re the ones who know your business. Kris, I observed, was one of those. Where IT intersected with payroll, she made it her business to know how every upstream part of it functioned. For many years I nudged her to go be an IT person. But if you know anything about bureaucratic organizations, you’ll know that they will hire any dude with a hypothetically-related degree and his head up his hindparts and will almost never hire a woman who actually knows what she’s doing. It’s hard to take years of “Payroll Analyst” and parlay that into “IT Business Analyst” unless a lot of stars line up. Sometimes Competent people stay where they are because the world is stupid.

That’s one reason I’m writing these articles. To make the world a little less stupid. There’s a problem with the way many HR operations measure “qualification.” Think about why most places look at years of “education and experience” (E&E) to weigh candidate qualification. Of course it has a lot of attraction to it. So seemingly-measurable. So seemingly-fair. Requiring the use of E&E measurement can also prevent managers hiring unqualified friends or hiring out of implicit bias because someone “seems” qualified when it’s likely just their race and gender expression.

But the sort of rigid measurement often works harder against eminently capable candidates who don’t have the benefit of implicit bias in their favor. People who may not get the leg-up into a career that shows nicely on a resume. People who volunteer at church doing IT “stuff” rather than getting a pretty internship doing it. People who do the work of the IT staff while classified as something inexpensive. Like a Payroll Analyst. Rigid ideas of “E&E” cement our biases because they advantage the already-advantaged. Education and experience very frequently have little bearing on whether someone can do a job. And many people who could do a job well can’t jump over an HR prejudice (or a hiring-manager prejudice) for “related” experience.

If you’re in a position to allow for broader looks at “related” when someone can show they can do a job, not by being a white guy, but by having co-workers singing their accomplishments, or they can prove it by answering tough questions, or they can do a quick probationary period and show it…figure out how to hire them. You’re probably missing out.

Kris was one of these. Any IT group would have been lucky to have her. I can think of some executives responsible for implementing a payroll system who could all have been replaced by one Kris with assuredly better results. But the world is stupid, and Kris kept to her role nudging herds of employee/cats in the right direction and ensuring they were paid. T’s crossed, i’s dotted, checks deposited. She took care of payroll better than anyone else I’ve met. But if you have checks that go to the right place and have the right numbers on them, and you’re curious about Competence, try to see who makes that happen.

Kris also took care of people. I’ve talked before about how some Competent people are almost invisible in an organization. Kris preferred not to be noticed, and was masterful at arranging things to keep it that way. She was always available for questions. If you had questions about how anything interacted with your pay, she knew everything and was happy to explain.

There’s a form of customer service that is a true art, where the interaction is genuine, but always positive. It just leaves out everything that isn’t providing service. When Kris was at work, that was her seamless, endlessly professional, capable, ready-to-assist nature.

Kris would head off problems by catching details others missed, whether in her own sphere or an adjacent one. She also had a sort of “dragon knowing her hoard” aura about employee records. Almost an uncanny ability to have to hand exactly the arcane historical record that would answer an off-the-wall question presented to her.

When Kris left her job to take a payroll position at our parent organization, she left a gap. It became quickly evident to everyone that there are payroll people, and then there are payroll people. For quite a long time she did her old job by remote control “supporting” the new person. And again when she finally retired, replacing her was...challenging. It took a couple of tries, and bringing her back on contract for a long while before a workable replacement finally stuck.

All of that wasn’t for lack of trying on her part to train and set up a successor for success. That’s the thing. Competent people don’t try to make themselves essential, they just are. Once you have someone who does so much and makes a circle of “we don’t need to worry about any of that, it’s taken care of,” those can be impossible shoes for others to fill.

The lesson I took from Kris was “Competent people know more than their own job.” Other stories in this series have illustrated the point also. But I think Kris highlights it best. No one ever resented Kris reaching into their work to make sure her work wasn’t impeded. Everyone appreciated her deft, quiet, unassuming knowing of things. She so masterfully helped that she was able to get things made right in others’ work without causing turmoil or strife.

Good managers will recognize this kind of “creates a circle of stuff I don’t ever have to worry about” employee. When these folks appear in jobs that go unnoticed, turnover can mean suddenly finding wrenches in formerly smooth critical activities. Don’t assume positions are unimportant because they aren’t “high level.” Good managers need to know where critical positions are. Some of those may be because the position itself is truly a linchpin. Others might be critical because a Competent person is in the position doing a whole lot more than others may realize keeping a big circle of operations around them running quietly well. Put the work into retention when you have those folks, the same as you might into an expensive employee. Too often employers mistake “low compensation” for “easily replaceable.” That is a serious mistake. Presumably a lesson learned by someone every time Kris ever left an organization.