Your skills are better suited at the desk
That sentence was said to me more than twenty years ago, and I can still tell you exactly where I was standing.
I was a receptionist at a small animal practice. The front desk was my job and I was good at it. When the phones went quiet I was also in the back running lab machines, prepping surgical flushes, doing the tedious work nobody wants and everybody needs. Nobody assigned me that. I kept asking what needed doing until the techs stopped being surprised to see me.
One afternoon the lobby got busy. I did my job, cleared it, closed out a couple of accounts, and walked back to treatment the way I always did. One of the veterinarians looked up and said, we do not need your help, your skills are better suited at the desk.
I went back to the front and finished my shift and told nobody.
Let me say the next part before I say anything else, because you deserve to know where I am standing now. I did eventually leave the desk. Practice manager, then minority owner, then operations across three hospitals. I am not holding that up as the happy ending. It is just where my road went, and I want you to know I am not writing to you from inside the job.
What I got wrong about that sentence for years
For a long time I heard it as a verdict on me. She looked at me and saw someone who was not enough for the treatment room, and I spent the next two decades answering a question she had not actually asked.
That reading was wrong, and it took me a long time to see why.
Her sentence was not really about my ability. It was a map. In her head there was a diagram of where a person like me could go, drawn by nobody in particular and inherited by everybody, and she was reading it out loud without noticing she was doing it. She was busy. She thought she was being efficient.
And here is the thing that took me the longest to name. The word doing the damage was not desk. It was better suited. She used the desk as a place you get sent when the real work is happening elsewhere.
The desk was never the lesser room. Everybody in that building had agreed it was, including me.
What the desk actually is
Think about what you do in a shift.
You are the first person a terrified owner speaks to and the last person a grieving one sees. You triage over the phone with no patient in front of you and decide what walks in the door in the next twenty minutes. You hold the schedule, which means you hold whether the whole team eats lunch. You have the money conversation, the hardest conversation in the building, and you have it with someone who is already scared. You know which clients are difficult and why, and you know it before the record does.
That is skilled clinical and emotional work performed under continuous interruption. Somebody decided a long time ago that it does not count as a profession, and that decision has been sitting there unexamined ever since, costing this field enormous amounts of talent.
Nothing is wrong with you for being in that seat. The design of the profession never accounted for what that seat actually holds.
Charting it yourself
If you are reading this, you have probably already had a version of my afternoon. Somebody told you where you belong, in a sentence they forgot ten minutes later and you have carried since.
You do not have to answer it the way I did. Proving someone wrong is a real engine and it is an expensive one. I ran on it for twenty years and hit a wall in 2019 that took me a long time to climb out of. Being driven by someone else’s low estimate of you is still handing them the wheel.
Here is what I would tell my twenty-something self at that desk instead.
You are allowed to name what you want out loud, to your practice manager, in plain words, without apologizing for wanting it. Most people never do, and then wait to be noticed. Ask to be taught the thing you want to learn and ask again in six weeks. Write down what you actually do in a shift, because the day someone tells you the desk is not skilled work, you will want that list and you will not be able to produce it from memory. Find the people doing this job at a professional level and get near them, because isolation is what makes an offhand sentence feel like the truth.
And when a sentence like mine lands on you, give it about a day before you decide what it means. The first reading is almost always the cruelest one, and it is almost never the accurate one.
I did not need to leave that desk to be a professional. I already was one. I just did not have anyone around me saying so, and I hope you do.
You are not broken, the system maybe is.
—
Ron Sosa, CVPM, CCFP, PgD-CLD**, is the founder of Syn-APT Neuroinclusive Leadership & Coaching and the author of Rewriting the Rules. He started at the front desk.
If you are carrying more than your schedule shows, the C.O.S.T. assessment takes about six minutes and gives you your results right away: https://syn-apt.me/cost
