When I left my previous hospital and came to my new one, I had no aspirations for management. However, it soon became apparent that I could not escape that role because, during the interview process, I was offered the role of clinical supervisor or charge nurse. After discussing my salary options, I realized I would have to take a significant pay cut if I were to go back to the floor. So, economic considerations decided for me.

As a clinical supervisor, I was responsible for making the schedule for my night staff, while my counterpart was responsible for the yearly evaluations of the night staff. I am not sure who came out on top in that one. We oversaw the care of the patients and made sure that they had the support they needed to do their jobs safely. We also ran the codes until the ER doctor arrived on the scene. As a result, we were required to be ACSL certified. We also assisted the nursing supervisor in enforcing discipline and served as watchdogs to ensure our staff adhered to the rules. As our employees were licensed professionals, this part was pretty simple.

I continued in this role for ten months, until the administration decided to stir things up. They essentially replaced all the clinical supervisors with part-time charge nurses. We were all given the option to remain, but this meant working the floors as regular nurses, with the possibility of picking up a day or two as a relief charge nurse. Well, half the clinical supervisors outright quit. The rest of us tried other options at the hospital. Within a few months, the administration realized what kind of mistake they had made. Not only did they lose a very large number of experienced nurses, but they also had a shortage of people willing even to fill the roles of relief charge nurses. The charge nurses routinely had to cover two and even three medical/ telemetry floors. Even though it has been years since they reinstated the position of Clinical Supervisor, they still have not fully recovered from that policy change. If an RN had done something comparable to this on the floor, they would have been immediately fired. Fair or not, the administrators responsible received no reprimands whatsoever. As I mentioned earlier, if something broke in the hospital, the nursing staff were responsible for fixing it, or, worse still, we were blamed for it.

I believe this trend to protect the administration is in part due to the “Peter Principle,” which states that members of a hierarchy are promoted until they reach a level at which they are no longer competent. Apparently, there is a growing acceptance of failures in the corporate world. It is changing the way companies approach innovation. While companies are beginning to accept the value of failure in the abstract—at the level of corporate policies, processes, and practices—it’s an entirely different matter at the personal level. Everyone hates to fail. We assume, rationally or not, that we’ll suffer embarrassment and a loss of esteem and stature. And nowhere is the fear of failure more intense and debilitating than in the competitive world of business, where a mistake can mean losing a bonus, a promotion, or even a job. Is this trend fair? I say no, but I don’t run things. I guess another term for this trend is the “good old boys club.” I have worked in the corporate field for over 35 years now. I have seen CEOs come and go; however, they never truly disappear. They’re often shuffled off to other corporations, where they repeat their mistakes all over again. I will include one real-life example here. Since the information is in the public domain, I will use his real name. The CEO at my first corporation that I worked at was Ronald J. Floto. The company was Kash-n-Karry (KnK). The parent company, Lucky Foods, owned it. This was the era of Reaganomics and hostile corporate takeovers. KnK was a highly profitable branch of the company, so it was sold off to prevent the whole company from being taken over. We became self-owned with Ronald J. Floto still retaining his position as CEO. Unfortunately, we were highly leveraged and could barely stay solvent. It did not help that one poor decision was made after another; eventually, Food Lion bought us out, and Floto lost his job. We even hired a company to help us with our customer service issues, which cost three million dollars for their services and close to three more million for our labor costs. It was just wasted money, because the program was crap and useless; besides, there was no way that we could afford to implement their practices. Our only problem was that we kept cutting our customer service staff back, so our customers had to wait increasingly long periods at the registers to check out. Who wants melted ice cream?

A little side note, when I went back to Florida on a road trip, I found out that Kash-n-Karry and Food Lion no longer existed in that state. KnK went bankrupt, thanks to Super Walmart and Food Lion, which just moved out of the state. You never know what I am going to include in my books, do you?

Kmart soon offered him the same position in their Super Kmart branch, which he ran for three years. Does anybody remember Super K-mart? He was more successful in his next job at Dairy Farm International, where he worked for 10 years. During this time, he was involved in a startup called FLT International, LLC, where he has been the president for 24 years and is currently still holding that position. I think you should now see the point that I am trying to make: these top-level administrators have nine lives. I think this is because they find ways to spread the blame to lower-level employees. I believe the term used is “scapegoat.” The Scapegoat theory refers to the tendency to blame someone else for one’s own problems, a process that often results in feelings of prejudice toward the person or group that one is blaming. Scapegoating serves as an opportunity to explain failure or misdeeds while maintaining one’s positive self-image.

Although my tenure as a clinical supervisor was brief, lasting just ten months, it provided me with numerous opportunities. I became familiar and friends with a lot of wonderful people, many of whom I would work with for many years to come. It also allowed me to become cognizant of the workings of the hospital, which would become all too valuable when I did relief float charge nurse and relief house supervisor work, both of which I did for over five years.