There is a danger in Human Resources of becoming an adrenaline junkie. As a generalist you can get so caught up in the day to day “emergencies” and putting out fires that you actually start to crave that immediate deadline and rush to be the hero and get it all done in time. We all like to be the hero and make everyone happy by getting it all done within their ridiculous expectations. The danger can be that, when the smoke clears and that all of the fires seem to be put out for the time being, one can often have a hard time returning to more proactive working practices. I experienced that this past week after charging though a insanely crazy first half of the year.

I have a small staff that is very hard working and dedicated. I’ll mention them frequently because they are a big part of my work life and success. One of my team includes a part time HR rep in our smaller northern office. Why that position is only part time is a longer story than we can cover here but let’s just say I am working with the hand I have been dealt. At the beginning of this year I was faced with the awful prospect of watching an employee resign due to illness. Unfortunately, it’s not the first time I’ve lost an employee to disease. Two years ago my team and I returned from Christmas break only to find our previous northern HR Rep had passed away over the New Year’s eve weekend. It is indescribable to lose a friend that way, let alone an employee. You have to simultaneously mourn and try to figure out how to move on, quickly. My old boss used to call it “trying to change the tires on the car while still driving down the road.” It was heartbreaking and challenging. You can imagine my situation when, this year, after returning from holiday break, the replacement for that same position was taken ill by a sudden severe disease, was forced to resign. (Thankfully, she has since gotten treatment and seems to be on the road to recovery).  What ensued after her departure was an impossible task of remotely recruiting for her replacement while trying to meet the normal busy business needs and employee ordeals which began to escalate beyond our expectations. Each day brought more challenges; discussions of two divisions restructuring; one with significant layoffs; numerous surprising resignations; high level of intern requests; and several other employee issues that led to counseling and a couple of terminations. There’s a whole discussion that can be had about how urgent some of this was but when you work for an organization that can be prone to shunning planning and strategy, you tend to expect it. For our midsized organization this would have been a busy year, but to have this in just the first few months was crazy.

When faced with this kind of torrent of requests, I imagine performing much like a short order cook in a busy diner. The orders keep flying in through the window and you are doing everything you can to keep the orders going out. No special orders please, just fill it and get it out. You begin to act on instinct and little by little, mistakes can slip through. Someone doesn’t get the side order of potato salad they ordered or the burger is a little undercooked. It’s true that I am the one on the team most prone to misspelling the Vice President’s name in the memo that just went out or transposing numbers in a salary that just went in the offer letter.  Knowing this my staff tends to push me to make sure we review everything more diligently. It becomes important to take the time to calm down from the rush and make sure we are double checking everything. Again it can be addictive to get everything out, quick and dirty, just to be the hero. We became focused on quick and correct which is not always easy to do. It means you have to be in more communication and holding off on sending that email out at midnight because you got it done and waiting to the morning to have a second pair of eyes to make sure you didn’t just give someone a promotion they weren’t expecting.

As I said, all of this was our January through July. Now when came in on the first day of August with most of the crisis’s solved and our to do lists still warm from the constant adding and checking off of burning tasks, we found ourselves a little lost. I have experienced this before and should come to expect it but it always seems to take me by surprise. You start looking around and thinking “what was I working on before this all started?” I started clearing my desk and filing away the now large collection of “important” memo drafts and background data collected during the year. We stopped in each others offices to ask a quick question but really it was because we were having trouble focusing and dealing with the current reality of no emergencies. We started to have discussions about future projects. “Do you think we can work in a revamp of the performance appraisal forms before September?” “Where were we on the harassment training again?” It was a bit like group therapy. It can be tough to reboot and start thinking proactively again but so important to wisely use this lull time to move forward on some of the projects we started out the year working on. We now have a new team member in the northern office who is coming along nicely. We have a busy fourth quarter to prepare for and thanks to the planning diligence of my team; we have the game plans to get there.

We all can be short term adrenaline junkies which is okay in the short term as you need to boost to muscle through.  I have known HR professionals that are full blown addicts. They usually take field rep positions which don’t require much planning, just a lot of reacting and putting out fires. I’ve done it and they can have it. I like a little more control over my crazy than that. Rehab is the key to recovery and how quickly you can rehab will determine how quickly you can go back to working on your more strategic work. We all have our ways to recover. Mine is cleaning my desk out and getting all my files organized. Okay, maybe it’s procrastination but that’s okay; it works. On Monday we will be jumping back into our more normal proactive project management and getting things done; all while waiting for the next round of crazy.