How to Herd Cats…It Matters

Hi and Welcome to the A & J PEI Treasures E Jean Simpson Author Blog Post and Podcast. I’m your host, Jean coming to you from the beautiful Province of Prince Edward Island, Canada!! The blog post and podcast is an opinion piece and only reflects this author’s opinion and not that of any other entity. I hold no designations in politics, economics or medicine. I am retired from the mental health field. I am a humanitarian and speak from that viewpoint only. Whether you agree with me or not, at least I hope it makes you think. This week I talk about a mistake that many institutions may make. It’s easy to solve…if you are willing to relinquish some long held beliefs. If you want to find out more, then stay tuned…!

Have you ever heard the saying it’s like herding cats? According to Gerald Holton, “Even in the best times, managing science has been compared to herding cats; it is not done well, but one is surprised to find it done at all.” The term herding cats means something that may be very difficult to accomplish because cats don’t tend to take well to direction…unless they want to. https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dict.... The problem for many institutions is that many of them think they can run every department the exact same way as they run administrative types. This is wrong and causes a lot of problems for the institutions and the people who rely on them. From life experience, I can tell you this is a recipe for failure on a grand scale. I once worked in a college up in Northern community. The Department head was brilliant at running the Counselling Department. He knew how to mingle, how to smooth ruffled feathers. He knew how to take half baked schemes and turn them into success. He knew the strengths and weaknesses of his staff. I could never have run the place half so well. I knew that. When I started to experience some difficulties with negotiating staff demands, I got called into his office. I must have ruffled feathers. I don’t remember what it was about. His talk was not a disciplinary action which I had half expected. All he did was clarify that I worked for the students and if there was anything with staff to let him know, it was his job to make sure things ran smoothly. It was a huge relief. I could focus on my real job of helping the students.

If there were issues, he’d have a whole staff meeting and included Student Services and Head teaching staff as a whole when we needed to get an issue resolved. We discussed the issues, came up with action plans. We all knew what was wanted and needed. We all knew what we needed to accomplish and he somehow managed to herd all those cats into a cohesive working group. He wasn’t totally perfect (no one is you know), but he did keep people from committing disasters. The staff was happy as what they wanted got put together in a cohesive package that was workable. Students got what was needed. Departments were on the same page with other departments. I won’t go into the details of when he left. But, the new management obviously did not understand herding cats. It resulted in chaos and burn out. I won’t describe the details of that either. I lost long time co-workers who were sensitive, artistic and passionate about their work.

I don’t tell this story to make things out to be perfect. I bring this up to illustrate the idea that sometimes you have to take into account the actual professionals who are in the situation and let them know they are stake holders and more importantly make them stake holders by using their ideas and action plans when in reason. They need to feel valued and what might work for example for Finance or Computer or Physical Education types might not work for Counselling or doctors or other more individualistic types. It matters that you understand the way various departments operate or at the very least have people running them that understand it. If you do not, if you insist on herding cats with some departments, you will run into huge issues, people quitting and the like. Remember that no one has the exact qualifications to run everything. You need to make sure that you have the proper management for the various departments and they have an understanding of the groups they are working with. Not everyone is going to want to ‘prove their loyalty’ by following protocols that alien to their nature.

Now, let’s put this into another venue. Governments are having a terrible time with medical care. In New Brunswick, Canada people are dying in the emergency rooms (ERs) https://globalnews.ca/news/9335030/vi... and https://atlantic.ctvnews.ca/rise-of-d.... In Nova Scotia, they’ve had a death in their emergency room https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-s.... The single cases miss out on the larger picture which shows actual numbers of deaths in ER in the Provinces are higher than reported, whether due to age or some other factor they are not all hitting the news. They are increasing all the time. It is only getting worse according to information in the articles. Though I was unable to find the same in Prince Edward Island ERs, one cannot help but wonder how long this will continue.

I see, from my experience with ER that they have a multi check system on the Island. Is this a protective step or an extra unnecessary step? It’s hard to say. I never had less than 8+ hour wait. The other problem one runs into with this issue is that a lot of the situations could potentially be taken care of before they become life threatening if there was enough medical staff to cover the population. Some things are actual sudden and sad accidents and those are the actual use for emergency. However, any time I was in emergency, there were also children with sniffles, fevers and could have been more safely seen by a medical practitioner of some sort rather than sitting for hours in emergency. Many of them left. Emergency seems to feel like it is being used as a replacement for having a doctor. I must state it is not the fault of the patients because they don’t have a doctor in most cases. So, people likely put off seeing someone unless it is urgent. Computer doctors can only do so much. It’s not easy for them as well I suspect. I must get back to the main point. The administrative end is not the sole issue. It’s a lack of resources definitely. However, is the administrative aspect of the whole thing just creating a worse problem for us? Are doctors and nurses trying to find greener pastures because of the administrative processes? Are there ways that they see that things would be better and they would be more likely to take a small town post? There are likely many factors. One of the things that I have long advocated is that if you want to attract professionals to your area, you are going to have to take your area seriously and take them seriously. That means, not only housing for professionals, but also housing for the workers. You need workers to take their role seriously. I’ve had some awesome customer service, but I’ve also seen some faux pas in how they dealt with customers. To be able to recruit professionals, you have to be able to provide professional and high level customer service. You have to treat each other with respect. You cannot respect some and disrespect others. See, this is something everyone needs to consider. The person at your customer service desk, they might be related to someone in some sort of medical or dental or whatever school. Do you want them to say, come on down and move here…they have awesome customer service and they want to know what you think and how to make things better using your feedback as well as other professionals (dentist, doctor etc.) They want to make this the best town on the planet. Aim high. If you don’t, it is unlikely to create enthusiasm to recruit professionals and workers to your town. The thing about aiming high is that you might not make the goal, but you’ll work at it. The other thing we need is to make sure we respect and appreciate service. We’ve had some customer service that I was so impressed by. Not because they could give us what we wanted, but because they would look into things and if necessary would order in stuff. They were respectful. If they didn’t have something they would say so. It’s one thing to say customer policy is…which should be enough to end the conversation, but quite another to make one feel less because of it. We’ve thankfully had very few of those experiences. We’ve had tons of great service. So, it is great to see so much of the town wanting to meet that goal already. The rest is up to the administrative sorts to start recruiting for specific types of administrators who understand the people that will be working for them. This is the hardest part of herding cats.

So, it is important, not only to have great customer service, but it is also important to understand that there are different temperaments and some people tend to gravitate to certain professions because it fits with their personality type. This means that you can’t run everything exactly the same. You need to recruit management that understands the differences between the groups. You aren’t going to get the same response from everyone and if you know or have someone who knows the different things, someone who is flexible in their running of things, they could make the difference between success and failure. I’ve seen it work both ways at the same place. What you do matters and how you do it matters too.

As Christopher Hitchens has been credited with saying, “Owners of dogs will have noticed that, if you provide them with food and water and shelter and affection, they will think you are God. Whereas owners of cats are compelled to realize that, if you provide them with food and water and affection, they draw the conclusion that they are God.” So, two different types of temperaments results in two different types of requirements. If you want to succeed with your huge conglomerates, various departments and Government agencies, you need to understand this simple concept. Whether you agree with me or not, I hope I made you think. Thanks for listening to my podcast and/or reading my blog post and thanks for your interest in A & J PEI Treasures! Keep watching because we’re always working on something. Thank you!

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