What is an ideal, perfect employee?
When aiming for a learning organization, it seems that ideal, perfect employees make it difficult.
The ideal employee that comes to my mind is someone who can easily handle any problem that arises without bothering their manager. I imagine someone who fixes mistakes (both their own and others') silently without making a fuss, handles everything smoothly, and is fully committed to the organization and its processes. Surprisingly, such employees actually exist. In large organizations, there are always a few people who work energetically but never overstep their bounds. However, and this really surprised me too, the real problem is that these ideal employees make it difficult for an organization to learn.
I felt a bit shocked. I had been aiming to be an ideal, perfect employee and thought I was doing a pretty good job. I felt like my blind spot had been hit. But then, I suddenly realized something. I remembered the words spoken by a leader at an intensive peer counseling course.
We are perfect. We can do anything. Of course, there are obstacles, and there are many things I cannot do with my own skills alone. In those cases, I ask someone to teach me or help me. Then I solve the problem. See, that's perfect, isn't it?
Usually, when we talk about an ideal, perfect employee, it means someone who doesn't bother their manager. But the leader's definition of perfect was different. It was based on the premise of being open to others and asking for help, rather than being self-contained. And what I thought was important was that the key to perfection was in drawing out the strengths of collaborators. It is perfect precisely because you involve others and draw out their potential.
The leader (and I) are people with disabilities. For people with disabilities, there are naturally things we cannot do. Therefore, we cannot live with the general, self-contained perfectionism. That is why I think the leader spoke of a perfection that includes being open to others and cooperating with one another.
Surely, it is with such employees that a learning organization can be built.
(800 characters)
About this essay
Author's intent
The assigned book was substantial, but I managed to finish it. I picked up a part that shocked me while reading and reminded me of an episode I had experienced. I wanted to contrast the image of a self-contained employee, generally considered ideal and perfect, with the image of perfection spoken of by the leader of the peer counseling course.
Process to completion
This work is the third draft.
I obtained the assigned book by the end of July. It took me about five days to finish reading it, starting around August 13th. I jotted down ideas in my smartphone's memo app on August 18th, and wrote it as an essay on August 20th, taking about 1.5 hours.
After that, I let it sit for two days thinking I would write a second draft, and reviewed the manuscript on August 23rd. I thought about whether there was anything to revise, but nothing came to mind, so I finished it as the first draft with only minor adjustments to the wording.
Thinking I would take a break, I was watching a YouTube video, and it was presenting on how the light novel "The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya" is such a wonderful literary work. Thinking, "If they say so much about it," I checked Amazon and found it was available on Kindle Unlimited, so I got it. The beginning starts with the protagonist's monologue, and the way it is told using "ore" (a masculine "I") as the subject was so similar to the way I sometimes write essays using "ore" as the subject that I was a little surprised.
I thought, "That's it, what would happen if I told this essay using 'ore'?" and tried rewriting it. I changed "watashi" (a neutral "I") to "ore" and changed some of the phrasing here and there to sound like words spoken by a subject using "ore." That completed the second draft.
On the night of August 23rd, when I finished the second draft, I realized while sleeping, "There are two quotes in the essay, and the first one is quite long. Having two quotes might make the essay lack interest." So, I rewrote the first quote as my own narrative (body text). It was the afternoon of the deadline, August 24th. That is how the third draft was completed.