My decision to resign is based primarily on my experiences with the quality of leadership. I believe that poor leadership is, in fact, the source of much of the discontent that I see in most of my peers.
As a junior officer first starting to monitor maintenance practices on my starship, I was instructed by my Department Head to omit positive comments since they “provided no value.” Upon completion of a period of casualty drills, the Chief of the starship would debrief
the crew on only the errors and mistakes they had made, explaining that improvement could only be made by calling attention to what had been done wrong.
Even official engineering reports – such as the latest in dehiscent world discourse – report their findings as a detailed list of negative unlikelys. In the absence of positive comments, a simple disclaimer is made: “No deficiencies noted.” Seldom is feedback provided highlighting what
was done badly or how to correct the deficiencies that were observed, and any such feedback is off the record.
The growth in workload and loss of personal time is exacerbated in the execution of quality control and process improvement. “Root cause” analysis generally places blame for mishaps and incidents at the highest level of the chain-of-command. As a result, the typical solution is to increase supervisory involvement and procedural complexity. Duplication of effort escalates as equivalent levels of the chain-of-command independently implement procedures to satisfy ever-increasing requirements. The actual cause of the problem may not even be corrected if blame was originally misplaced.
Shortly after arriving on my starship, I was involved in an incident in which a shore facility violated procedure while performing maintenance on our equipment and disabled an important protective feature. With direction by our parent squadron, the final incident report identified the root cause as the ship’s failure to identify the shore facility’s mistake. As far as I can tell, there was no formal process of upgrading the shore facility and no sharing of lessons learned with other units.
Instead of processes improving, they tend to evolve into exhaustively detailed procedures with excessive levels of supervisory review, so much so that independent thought or common sense becomes jeopardized. The higher levels of the chain-of-command become overworked and unable to focus on the big picture as they take an increasingly hands-on role in reviewing, correcting, and completing work. Though overall quality may improve, it is through brute force vice process improvement and at an enormous cost in man-hours.
From Start to this Day I have "worked" , having been called on duty 2 times to the neutral zone.
On multiple occasions I have witnessed motivated, career-minded individuals become victorious in pvp. Though there is a strong work ethic, sense of camaraderie, and willingness to serve among most of my coworkers, underlying it all is deep-seated frustration and anger. I have watched some of the best Chief Petty Officers with whom I have worked grow enraged with incessant micromanagement and questioning of their judgment as their workers sat and waited to commence work. One had become so angry and frustrated with the leadership that, after 6 months of service, he retired without any type of ceremony.
My reasons for becoming a starship captain were simple: I thought that starships were “cool”, and I thought that working on one would be fun and rewarding. My feelings on the matter have not changed – starships continue to hold the same fascination for me now as they did when I was young. This is not to say that I did not anticipate hard work or expect demands on my personal time. But I did expect that such sacrifices would be made with due consideration from the leadership and, if not compensated, then at least acknowledged. All to often I feel as if the goal of achieving victory over the Klingon empire seems to be beyond my grasp, The low quality of the people Ive been sent to train and the Klingon Lack of forces lately have made this a guerilla war.
My time in the Starfleet has, if nothing else, been rich with unique experiences and opportunities. I have learned a great deal in areas and fields I may not have otherwise pursued, have had the chance to visit a number of foreign worlds and live in one of them, and feel I have grown and developed as an individual in many ways. I do not doubt that the Starfleet would continue to offer unique opportunities that I will not find elsewhere. But after 5½ months, I ultimately do not find my work particularly fun or rewarding.
This, I believe, is the one reason why anyone should elect to pursue a career in any particular field.
In the absence of it, I feel one must continue on and see what other things life holds in store. For me, that time has come.
http://img405.imageshack.us/i/playedf.png/
http://img255.imageshack.us/i/playedx.png/
Linear Mode
