A paradigm

I’ve been wondering how I would characterise my time spent in the public sector. I was toying with writing something about how working here is the opposite of being a ventriloquist. The art of ventriloquism is to appear silent while saying as much as possible. In the public sector, the art is using as many words as possible while actually saying nothing at all.

I was thinking of saying something along the lines of replace verbs with meaningless terms such as enable, engage, unlock.

But I don’t need to write this, because something has happened which neatly summarised the whole experience. I recently got the results of my “360 degree review”. This is one of those asinine terms made up by human relations consultants, which essentially means getting a whole lot of people to review your performance, rather than just your direct manager. The 360 degrees in this sense refers to a complete panoramic view of your performance. It’s like poetry.

And here some actual comments I received:

• Work together as a team better to create synergy
• Be proactive
• Focus on adding value
• Find ways and opportunities to work together better
• Be seen to be communicating positively with others

There’s not a specific, tangible suggestion in there. What am I supposed to do with this? Be proactive and create synergy to add value? Jeez, am I living in freakin Dilbert cartoon? And without a shred of irony, the comment on improving communication is completely incomprehensible.

To top it all off 2 of the 3 people responsible didn’t bother to fill it out. So it wasn’t so much a 360 degree panorama taking in the landscape of my performance, as a jaundiced one-eyed squint from my jaded manager. And I got the results 6 months late. 3 days before I leave the organisation.

I’ll be sure to action those key learnings going forward.