In the times since i joined 2+2 in 2003, and then when i followed you all over here, what ive really loved is having a bunch of smart, mostly like minded folks to over analyse and over think with.
Reading the working from home thread, its clear that many of you, like me, have changed interests from poker, dating, etc to managing and being successful at work.
Based on that, please consider this an invitation to over analyse and over think every tiny aspect of your working life, people management challenges or crappy bosses.
Starting us off. I currently manage a sales and service contact centre. Ive been doing my masters in energy in the evenings.
I also work for an energy company that does lots of cool stuff. But not in my area.
I love what i do, but i also want to make more of a difference and get more involved in energy rather than just sales. Undecided whether to move sideways/down, or keep working my way up (slowly) in contact centre /sales.
My bosses bosses boss probably does more energy related stuff, but all the interesting stuff (solar, battery, electric vehicles, hydrogen, pumped hydro, etc) are done in a completely different team.
Sadly I have come to the conclusion that the way to get what you want in any organization is to relentlessly kiss the ass of the person who can make it happen.
Almost without fail in my career, I have seen less competent people skyrocket to the top of organizations while their more productive peers get left behind, all because of politics and interpersonal relationships.
Ultimately I deduced to opt out of that game, but there is a lot of money to be made for those that choose to play.
You need to look at this differently. Interpersonal skills are not superfluous to success in a large organization. They are critical. Success in any human enterprise is part core skills and part ability to thrive in the culture. In fact, research shows that no matter how good the core skills are they will always be clouded by difficulty or unwillingness to play the social game.
we get four people across three companies to agree on a meeting time
person send meeting invite for friday
I accept the invite and notice that I also have an invite for the same meeting on thursday
I email the organizer and say “is this a duplicate meeting thursday morning?” (I think we had tentatively sort of agreed to that time before we finalized on the friday timeslot)
orgainizer says “oh yeah I’ll delete that one”
I don’t disagree with this at as a whole but sometimes the boss’s that get promoted by playing in the social game are terrible communicators with their subordinates.
if you send a google doc for a cow-orker to review, would you prefer if they just went ahead and fixed totally minor issues such as commas, doubled words, spelling, etc or would you rather they use the “suggesting” feature?
spending today carefully curating my meme folder, tomorrow is our Q2 wrapup all-hands and I will be slacking good memes to cow-orkers during the call to see who has the best poker face
(on a zoom with a cow-orker who I’ve never met in person (I haven’t met any of them in person since I just started this job last July and the one guy I had worked with before left the company a couple of months ago), he has literally never seen me in any situation other than me sitting at my desk in my office on zoom)
(totally normal discussion of work items)
cow: (out of the blue) dude how tall are you, like 6’3"??? you seem really tall.
me: uh, what? yeah I’m 6’5".
cow: yeah I can tell. I can just tell when people are tall. I didn’t want to sound crazy so I just said 6’3" but you seem taller than that.
A cow-orker is a person who specializes, either professionally or as a hobby, in orking cows.
Cow orking dates back to the Middle Ages (100 A.D. - 1953 A.D.), and the first cow-orker, St. Francis of Assisi. Over the years, various non-holy methods of orking cows have been developed, as ranchers with large herds needed a quick and easy way to bring their feisty cows under control.
Needs an update to add that they can do document reviews as well :)
Tip for anybody that has Office/Microsoft 365 and has to schedule meetings with people whose calendars you can’t see - Go and download Findtime, it’s a free Outlook plugin from MS that is just amazing. You set up a poll with the available times, Findtime holds all of those times on your calendar so you don’t schedule anything else, it sends out the poll, and when everybody votes it will automatically schedule the meeting and remove the holds on your calendar. It made my life 100% better at my previous job where I was scheduling meetings with 12 or 15 different stakeholders and it would take a week to figure out everyone’s availability.
The stuff that I would fix would normally be the stuff the spell checker in the document points out. Anything bigger than that should go through the process, whatever that is…