Hostile Work Environments
Fri., January 11, 11:20 AM
Y’know, I get some of my best “kick starts” from other people’s journals. Two people have recently reminded me of how we are affected by the people with whom we work. Some co-workers are such a joy!
I think most people learn this earlier than I did: people who know are willing to teach you, but people who are not quite up to speed are not willing to share. Since I was always happy to teach others and I was not competing with them, it didn’t occur to me that someone would actually try to hinder me by holding back knowledge. Of course, it also never occurred to me that the goal of success for the company was not the same as individual success. (You could read The Goal by E.M. Goldratt if you wanted some background on that mindset. The novel is a little dated, but the message is good.)
One fellow from the same company wrote an interesting article in the same vein. His opinion was that supervisors never hire staff who are were good as they, people who might outshine them. (He was a living example of it. Ahem.) Thus, if you were a TEN, you would hire NINEs or lower. If you promoted those NINEs into managerial positions, they wouldn’t choose anyone higher than an EIGHT. Eventually, of course, your enterprise would fail because you would have only mediocre employees running the business. Clue: look at the data entry. When I receive a letter addressed to Mr. [myname] or to Husband but with my middle initial, it goes right into the trash.
He was right, y’know. I hope he was able to sell a few more articles. This little company got itself into cash flow problems and was sold. Most of us knew it was sinking, as one executive after another deserted the ship. I waited — almost the last one — so that I would be able to claim unemployment.
Someone else wrote about a supervisor who is not only clueless about the department but also a bully. I don’t deal with bullies, as you may know, and I came to this decision some time before the last bully even tried it on me. This man and I had some common experience and, early in the work relationship, when he was nice to me because he really needed my help, I mentioned something that should have stayed with him.
“I had a job that I loved, and I lost it,” I reminded him. “But I survived, and I can never be that scared again.” That was, by the way, the absolute truth.
Some five years later, he had hired a CPA he could push around, and he figured he could let the bookkeeper go. It was the practice in that company, whenever possible, to push people into resigning — hostile work environment is illegal, y’know — so that the company would not be liable for increased unemployment taxes. I had been in charge of payroll there; I recognized the process!
He never could understand why I didn’t dissolve into tears when he threatened to fire me. I had removed myself from his direct supervision, and he would come into my office to harangue me, and it never worked. He would then go and yell at the CPA, with complaints that were no more irrelevant to him than they were to me. That’s a bully for you. Stand up to him, even if it ’s just once, and he can’t hurt you any more. It’s a liberating experience.
Come to think of it, maybe that guy didn’t realize he had hired an ELEVEN!
