Avalanche!

Have you ever started out to do a good thing and find it all snowball into a huge mess? There are times in all of our lives when this happens. We see something that needs to be taken care of and upon further investigation we find that many things are amiss. Or a worker or student comes by just to let you know that so and so is doing something like filching office money or selling office supplies on the side. Three of these kinds of things happened to me this week and I'm still reeling.

As a new administrator I've been dancing around several ideas related to the hullabaloo that follows the discovery of these unfortunate events. It seems that there are a few predictable ways people respond to finding out that something is grossly amiss. Here are a couple scenarios:

"I'm going straight to the principal and tell!" This is not an uncommon response. People who do this usually have a hard time maintaining their anxiety. In other words, it's so anxiety producing to have something wrong or out of line that they rush to the higher ups and report what they have found. They don't want to be implicated in anything bad, so are quick to point out what others are doing wrong. I'm not sure that they want a pat on the head necessarily, but they do want things to be correct and smooth.

"Then Mary said to Tom..." Some people were born watching other people live and have no intention to do it themselves now. These individuals find another person to talk the problem over with fully and completely. Every angle is examined and discussed. After one or both get insight and incidentally, gain strength from each other's knowledge and validation of their ideas, they keep a buzz going about the latest development. And they do nothing about it themselves except to complain or point out the issue to anyone who will listen.

"Well, what do you know?" This person wants to sit back and watch to get a good grasp of the situation while they think of various ways to address the problem. These individuals only do this if there is no immediate, significant threat to life or limb. It is an art to switch into ethnomethodologist mode--the researcher-observer who wants to fully understand why people do what they do, how they do it, how it affects other people, what the losses are, and what the individual(s) gain from the behavior. Then they act on what they have observed, pulling in another appropriate entity or entities to deal with the issue.

"Howdy, Pilgrim!" This John Wayne impersonator sees something or someone who operates contrary to how they should and wades into the situation to right it themselves. Very little forethought goes into this kind of response. "I'm going to blow this wide open and then we'll see if they can get away with that!" Unfortunately, this approach rarely takes into account all that can go wrong from an indelicate rush upon the wrongdoers. And, in true John Wayne style, declare mennacingly, "Like *$#!@!, you'll do that again!"

As I've watched the turmoil that has resulted from problems I discovered this week, I have been amused by my own response. All three of the issues have been going on since I started this job, and they have driven me almost to distraction. When I started asking questions about one of the situations, it blew up and I was able to see what was being protected and hidden. Two other situations were ones about which I began documenting the second week in this job. Pulling in our Human Resource officers, the revelations that followed nearly ripped my workplace apart. All I knew was that these three issues were intolerable. I had no idea an avalanche would follow.

So tonight I'm trying to climb my way out and see the sunlight again. Life is not for the fainthearted.