Big letdown

What to do when your boss turns out to be the biggest obstacle to your projects: Quit?

I've been here only 14 months and I've done so much already. I don't think I should leave just yet. Robert Kuan, chairman of St. Luke's Medical Center, stated it succinctly: The secret to happiness is knowing when to let go. I hear you, Robert.

It's too soon. And there are other, alternative remedies to my situation still.

My boss pays lip service to going global, yet he is immersed in a feudal culture. His view of the successful corporate organization is the absence of dissent among and from the employees. In that case, what he wants are automatons, not people. He does not believe in the agree-to-disagree approach, dialog and negotiation. I am not surprised, considering the lack of two-way communication among the sectors and the levels of this organization.

So. There is an elephant in the parlor but no one is brave enough to admit to its presence.

When the proven formula, which is to get the right people on the bus and get the wrong people off, doesn't work for you because you can't get your boss, the administrator, off the bus, what do you do? The only alternative I see at this point is to work on him slowly and carefully.

Riverside General is headed for a crisis. Several crises, actually, from several sectors: the staff, the doctors, and the senior management team. Maybe even the Board. And when that happens, I'm going to receive the brunt of it, as those who've always opposed me and my projects will capitalize on the crisis and use me as a scapegoat. As my boss listens to these misguided, unenlightened buffoons, that does it for me. When that happens, time to go.

Which is sad because I don't really want to leave RGH and the people who've become such good friends. (And Freddy.)

Like I said, there are still options available to me. So the battle plan is this:

1. Get Freddy on the Board as a voting member. This ensures that I have representation and source of information at the top.
2. Continue working with the doctors with Freddy at the helm. This will deviate his attention from my efforts at staff development.
3. Start work on several fronts, such as the medcart and the history projects (a coffee table book on the hospital's history for its 50th anniversary). Again, a diversion.

In the meantime, I should lie low and make like daddy's good little girl doing daddy's bidding. More and more, I seem to be needing Freddy to succeed in many things. Freddy shouldn't be seen to be too close to me. It wouldn't do to get him identified with me.

Things aren't so bad, really. Just moving too slowly.

Closer

A lot of things have happened since I last posted. For one, Freddy and I have become closer. So close, in fact, that I'm beginning to get scared. Of what? Responsibility. I'm not the most sensitive person in the world. I have no capability to handle emotional intimacy. I get scared of emotions and Aha! moments.

I'm scared that, should Freddy choose to share with me an emotional moment and open up to me, I woudn't know what to do. We've become so vulnerable to each other that the possibility of pain and missed meanings is now so very, very real. Once, he's shared a frustration with a colleague that he claims he hasn't shared with anyone else. Besides his wife, I suppose. And twice, he's shared with me his frustrations and fears at work, stating that he needed someone to talk to. It was me he thought of. And one of those times, he hadn't told even his wife yet.

Scary. I am scared of emotional intimacy.

Friends have told me about his rep as a top honors student in class and the proverbial pressure from parents to always be the best. My childhood, in turn, can be found at the other end of the spectrum. Although my parents urged us to do well, there was no pressure to scale the heights of the academic ladder. (Or any ladder, for that matter. We were brought up in an organized jungle of fun in learning.)

With that kind of upbringing, I wouldn't be surprised if the poor guy's all burned out at this point. So now, he's just looking for love and appreciation for what he is, not what medal he's brought home for show.

I'm thinking, another door has opened in my universe and this is an area of my self that I believe needs to be developed before I go on to the next level. Perhaps this is my karmic debt and Freddy is a link to failures in past lives. Very intriguing.