Honestly Representing Who And What You Are

I belong to a number of groups on LinkedIn. One in particular is geared towards jobs in health care. I’m not looking for a job, but every once in awhile someone is looking for a consultant who does what I do, so I like to keep my options open.

Recently there was an interesting post that showed up. In the email, it said it was a unique consulting opportunity where you’d be working from home. I thought ‘hey, that works for me’, and immediately logged onto the site to check it out. When I started reading, I was dismayed to see that it wasn’t really an assignment one could work from you. It was a traveling gig, where you’d be on the road from Monday through Thursday and back home on Fridays, with a requirement that you live near an airport.

I responded to that post for everyone to see that I thought it was a disingenuous job posting because it wasn’t a work at home job at all, and had totally misrepresented what it was. No, I didn’t hear back, and no one else has said anything about it.

Companies and individuals misrepresent themselves all the time. They say they can do and handle things that they can’t. For instance, in the health care side of what I do, many companies will put bids on projects that they know they can’t do, but they do it and then turn around and look for people who actually can do the job. I shouldn’t overly gripe because I’ve gotten a couple of subcontracts that way, not knowing about the original contract to begin with, but it just seems fraudulent to tell someone you can do something you can’t.

I have a friend of mine who told me that the worst thing I could ever do in any of the things I do to make money is to tell someone I can’t do it. In her opinion, I can always find someone who can handle the part of the job that’s beyond me, pay them, and do the rest of the job so I can claim I did it all. My problem with that is what if something goes wrong, or it’s not what the client wanted, and they want to watch me fix it. I’d be found out in a heartbeat, and that would be that for that client, and possibly other clients if word got out.

I’ve seen what happens when consultants misrepresent their qualifications for certain jobs. I’ve been encouraged to say that I have the background to do medical diagnosis coding. I know how to read a medical record and how to look for certain things contained within, but by no means am I a medical records coder, and I also don’t have a degree. I’ve also been encouraged to put in for chief financial officer positions. I know I could do probably 75% of what they do, but that other 25% I’d never have a clue, and wouldn’t even want to try to do.

The same kind of thing happens with leadership positions. More than half the people who are in those positions weren’t anywhere close to being qualified to fill them. Every day I hear about a supervisor or manager who did something bordering on being illegal or unethical. They have no real clue how to work with others, or get others to work with them. They have no idea how to tell people when they’re doing badly, whether they’re too soft or hard on them. Lack of good communication skills is inherent in so many of these people that it’s no wonder they knew how to lie to get the position in the first place.

We need to get to a place where there’s more honesty and integrity in business and our personal lives. Anyone expecting perfection is looking in the wrong place, but looking for quality, and someone who’s telling the truth about things, is something we all deserve. And, me being me, I’ll call it out when I see it; what about you?