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Hi, I’m Jackie Jarrell, and I work in the Organizational Excellence group at Raftelis. I love that it’s called Organizational Excellence because we focus on the people in the different organizations that we get the pleasure of working with. Specifically, I work in organizational assessments and strategic planning, and I’m also involved in executive coaching.
During my career at Charlotte Water, I worked in engineering, particularly in many operational areas like industrial pretreatment and wastewater treatment. I then moved into a deputy director role, where I worked with the frontline in customer service and field operations, and was also very involved in sustainable practices and operations. So, I’ve had a lot of experience working with many different people throughout all levels of the workforce and utilities.
I have also seen a lot of change over the years. One of the really great things about working at Raftelis now is that I’m able to take that experience and try to help other utilities, giving them some perspective from the different things I’ve seen and experienced in my roles. You know, sometimes things were very, very difficult. Sometimes there were things that we really had to take time to work through.
However, all of those experiences were very, very rewarding. They helped me to really learn not only about all the technical things—because I learned and loved technical things in my background—but also that people are really where it’s at. I’m an engineer, so I like technical things, but people are really where it is. I think it’s truly important for any organization to know that if you take care of your people and you make sure that they feel valued, then you start to really have a team that can work together to make anything successful.
One of the things that I see happening now is that we have a lot of people who are trying to learn how to be those leaders. The workforce is changing so quickly, and at times, it’s even making it a little bit harder to find people who want to take on those steps. It can be really, really scary, especially if you’ve been in a technical role for a long time, and then you become a supervisor or a manager. Now you’re taking care of people. Even though you have that technical background, it’s a very different job to be a leader, a manager, or a supervisor. This applies to every level of supervision. So, you might have someone who is working on a crew and they are moving up to be a crew chief. They know how to work as part of the crew because they’ve been doing that work. But when you suddenly have to be in charge of the crew, the whole way you work with that team and keep that team together requires a whole different set of skills.
A lot of times people refer to those skills as “soft skills.” I don’t like that term. I feel like they’re actually the harder skills, but they are very, very important in order to have a successful team.
