Anyone who knows where I work should know I have my hands full as a supervisor. At any given time I am supervising anywhere from two to eight employees, or possibly up to 16 and a multi-million dollar facility. Add to that a population of 350-400 plus supervising my employees and it gets a little crazy at times.
Now, working where I do, everything thing we do is policy driven. Seriously, I mean everything. For example, there are policies that dictate how we are to feed people, shaving and haircuts, garbage removal and medical services. There is even a policy that describes how policies are to be written. I think we get the idea.
Now let’s talk about Liability; the reason why we have so many policies is to avoid Liability. Liability leads to law suits, which obviously cost the county money. So we look to avoid Liability by making sure we within our policies, which fall within the law the rights guaranteed to people who are housed in my facility.
So when an incident occurs, I expect my people to act accordingly. Most times (in fact, almost all times) my people do as they should. Of course, with any incident, we can always look back and judge it from the arm chair. But that’s not my point. I work with capable people, who do their jobs pretty well and generally make my life easier because it.
However, every now and then, someone doesn’t do their job correctly. And when I discover it 3 or 4 days later, I am forced to act on it. This situation is one I don’t like. I don’t like feeling like I am coming down on my people. I don’t like writing the paper that will eventually end up getting someone’s ass chewed. Even more so, though, I don’t like someone not doing their job right and leaving me to deal with the possible consequences.
So this is my annoyance today. I spent the better part of Monday working on a memo I really didn’t want to right. But I did. I don’t feel guilty. I am disappointed though in the fact the memo had to be written in the first place.
Liability. The L word. It affects us all in various ways. We simply work to avoid it. At least I do.
There is always responsibility that comes with responsibility. No one likes to do it, but it has to be done. Knowing you, you will do a good job. Keep up the good work.
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