In short: more headaches, not more money
You are responsible for your staff and making sure that your department looks good to your superiors and free of OIG complaints/Joint Commission violations/etc. Also a headache to staff appropriately when the VA sets you up for being chronically understaffed, and some of your staff might not like being told what to do and will report you to the union. I have a chance this week to basically apply for a clinical supervisor position with my name on it if I wanted it (because no one currently internal at the facility wants it), but no thanks.
Also, I just realized I literally answered this question above.
You say that from the perspective of someone trying to do a good job. Knowing the supervisors you know at the place where you are at, is that an accurate assessment of their motivations? It takes a special kind of person to be a competent supervisor, and not necessarily a good person. It actually helps (and I mean this unironically) if you aren't.
Where do VA managers go after 3 years, back to staffing? What makes the job that challenging? What ends up driving them out?
Please elaborate on number 3. I know that pharmacy has low power as a dpt. and has trouble holding the line at the hospital meetings, but I definitely don't know the nuts and bolts of it.
How common are disciplinary actions at VA and other than documentation and reviews, how is it complicated to move someone out?
They leave.
The nuts and bolts are the Civil Service guarantees career tenure. Even for nonperformance, the process to fire a nonsupervisory employee is quite onerous except for shirking work (AWOL), stealing money (not drugs) from a Civil Service agency, or loss of license.
Multiple choice question:
Who has been fired from the VA?
A. Serving as a getaway driver for a store robbery WHILE being in jail on duty time
B. Doing lines of cocaine in front of a known security camera as well as having inappropriate relations with two direct subordinate staff
C. Swinger who bullied his contractor (non-Civil Service) pharmacists to participate in the swinging club or not get their contract renewed. And caught on tape as well as confessed to it
D. In a position of National Security, openly was a gambling addict and was in debt to a foreign service agent
E. None of the above
The answer is E of course. A still has a job and gets CWT. B is a SES incumbent. C got a transfer and still works for the VA in the Midsouth, D got to retire four years into the investigation to fire him.
That's why I ask the question. I don't want a good person in a supervisory job, I want an effective one. If they are good people, fine, that's not necessary and in fact detrimental in certain cases.
Personally, I consider about 60% of the Title 38 staff to be on the up-and-up and of those, 20% (12% overall) are downright exemplary where despite how badly the VA treats them, they heroically will presevere and do their jobs beyond the call of their profession and despite the V screwing them over with policies or politics. 25% are mediocre and if you were really motivated to fire them, you could make up a reason. 10% are truly incompetent and dangerous, and 5% are criminally dangerous (as in physically or sexually assaulting patients bad), and those you spend the vast, vast majority of time either working on harm reduction or putting them through the process. I've actually been in the position that had I continued to work to fire someone, I would have been murdered by that person and I was certainly terrified of him and took his threats completely seriously. My successor was nearly killed (medically retired due to the received TBI as well as other issues) by the employee which is a famous case in the VA now. By the way for those in the VA, that's why the Level IV training exists now, that incident at Hines as well as Roxbury and Augusta.
The benefit of career tenure is that when you have a malevolent sociopath as your boss, you can endure them out if nothing else. The problem of career tenure is that if you are the malevolent sociopath, it's very difficult to get rid of you even with damning evidence. It's not the quantity of disciplinary, it's the quality, and the likelihood of personal retaliation. This is why I keep my PLI up-to-date as well ensure that I am not a supervisor at the higher levels over anyone but senior grade staff.
If you are actually going to get the job done well, you have to be able to know when to toe the rules and when to break them for the greater good, without getting caught.
And what I wrote is purely what is relatable to the private sector as a top-down matter. There's a whole different world in the down-top when you have to deal with front office, region (VISN), and national (Central Office) management, and how they compete, backstab, and pressure for results. It is rare to have one master, and often times, you have to gang up with two to play against the other one. There's been times where you get regional and national to beat up your local management in the morning (performance measures), spend lunch plotting with local and regional staff to screw over national funding allocations (the so-called "Veterans Equitable Resource Allocation", and finish the day with getting national PBM to give to come-to-Jesus talk to the corrupt regional director over formulary micromanagement. And all parties know it, and the question is not whether they want you gone, but how to make sure that it's not immediately on their minds. Now that I am Central staff, I have to deal with lies all the time from local and regional areas, and the tricky part is figuring out why, because everyone lies from the perspective of self-preservation, but knowing the motivation helps you figure out what is actually going on at the field level from Central directives. The VA bureaucracy is intentionally set up to have adversarial/volatile relationships between three parties, and a sense for knowing when the time to cooperate and the time to compete are what we are looking for in a successful managment candidate.
