Their stories have the same ring to them. Neither of them expected to be the boss.
The two are Patrecia Hargrove and Kathy Harris. The arcs of their lives are unique, but there are some parallels.
Hargrove was toiling away in Greenville, Miss., where she was a grants administrator. Life was good. She enjoyed her job and was doing well in it. She might have been there to this day except her son started growing up. As he got older, he wanted to play team sports, she told The Commercial for a story that was published on Saturday.
The travel that went with the sports activities was the problem. She was already traveling a lot for her job, which left her unable to do what she felt she needed to do as a mother. Forced to pick between her son and her job, she started looking for another job.
That’s how she wound up at the Southeast Arkansas Economic Development District. When she applied, she asked the executive director Glenn Bell if travel was involved. He said no. And that sealed the deal.
Independent reporting for Pine Bluff & Jefferson County since 1879.
At first, she worked in workforce development, helping people get an education. But she said that as a grant writer, she couldn’t help herself when she saw the other grant writers getting backed up, and she would offer to help out.
There’s a pattern here. Hard work, family bonds, helping out where help is needed.
Eventually, to keep her, the district created a grants administrator job for her. And when Bell left, she eventually was named executive director. Of course she was.
The story about Harris, published on Sunday, started 44 years ago when she became the assistant to Clarence Perkins, the director of the Southeast Arkansas Behavioral Healthcare System.
As the writer told it, Harris was “driven, organized and had an eye for detail when it came to gathering data for reports and the tenacity of a bulldog who was able to complete projects on time.” That says it all.
Suddenly, what started out as “just a job” became something that she became committed to.
And you can imagine where this is going. Ten years ago, when Perkins retired, the board looked around and then around some more and kept coming back to Harris as a successor. She didn’t think she was up to the challenge and even pointed out why she would not be a good candidate. The board would have none of it and eventually persuaded her to take the position. Now, after almost half a century at the agency, Harris is retiring, to much acclaim by those who urged her on.
Reading about these two women got us to thinking about millennials, which are said to be those born between 1980 and 1996 or between 24 and 40 years of age.
Statistically, millennials are eager to job hop, as it’s called, meaning they are quick to take other jobs as they look for employment fulfillment. This is not a finger wag at the young or their penchant for looking out for themselves. They are cutting their own path, which is what each generation has to do. It is more along the lines of something we heard a lawyer tell a young person who was looking for a job – one that was just perfectly awesome, as if those exist. He said, “you have to put your paddle in somewhere,” meaning just get going and keep at it and you never know where it will lead. To do otherwise is to stand on the banks and watch the river go by.
These two women definitely got going. They did what they were hired to do and they excelled at it. Neither one was angling for the boss’s job, but in the end, those around them recognized that with their experience and stick-to-itiveness, these two were by far the best candidates to run things.
We’re sure that a millennial will tell us the benefits of constantly being on the move, testing the waters, taking on this and then that, chop, chop. But then there’s the tortoise to remember; he did OK for himself, too.