Here's a collection of lightly edited expressions of frustration, disdain, and disbelief about jobs today, and about how people in those jobs are managed. Some are based on specific reports that have come my way, and some are mixtures of reports from several people. Any similarity to your situation is both coincidental and unfortunate.
- Twice they've laid off my best friends. Time to go.
- Whenever layoffs happen, I get more work and no raise.
- I used to "stretch" to deliver superior performance, only to be rated "meets expectations." I thought, "What a lie," but now I realize that stretching myself was their expectation.
- The only thing I hate more than being told to undo what somebody just finished is being told to undo what I just finished.
- I take that back. I hate even more being told to do something that I know somebody will have to undo as soon as I'm finished.
- If meetings were any more mind numbing, they'd be classified as illegal drugs.
- I used to trust my boss to tell me what was really going on. I now realize that he doesn't actually know.
- I liked my old boss better than my new boss. Neither of them knows what they're doing, but my old boss at least knew that he didn't know.
- I don't know what's worse: (a) my boss making decisions about stuff he's clueless about, without consulting us; or (b) my boss asking our advice, and then not taking it. Wait, it's (a). At least with (a) he doesn't waste our time before making the wrong decision.
- Two things are If meetings were any more mind
numbing, they'd be classified as
illegal drugs.mysterious about Steve: (a) how he spends his time, because he sure doesn't do his job; and (b) how he gets away with it. - Only one way the cafeteria could be worse: if they raised the prices. Ah. They just did. Never mind.
- I stuck sticky notes on my wall with fake passwords to fool password thieves. Then IT ran a surprise inspection and wrote me up. I told them the passwords were fake, but they said no passwords on the walls, real or fake. The I in IT must stand for idiotic.
- I got used to my boss not keeping her promises, but I can't get used to her denying she ever made them.
- I have so much work that I can't focus on anything long enough to remember where I was when I had to drop it to do something more urgent.
- I used to tolerate the bad parts of my job because I loved the good parts of my job. Now I don't even know what the good parts of my job are.
- Why am I classified as a "resource?" I'm a human being.
That's all for now. I'm collecting these items, so send me yours, and when I get a batch together, I'll send them out. Top Next Issue
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Related articles
More articles on Personal, Team, and Organizational Effectiveness:
- Selling Uphill: Before and After
- Whether you're a CEO appealing to your Board of Directors, your stockholders or regulators, or a project
champion appealing to a senior manager, you have to "sell uphill" from time to time. Persuading
decision makers who have some kind of power over us is a challenging task. How can we prepare the way
for success now and in the future?
- Working Journals
- Keeping a journal about your work can change how you work. You can record why you did what you did,
and why you didn't do what you didn't. You can record what you saw and what you only thought you saw.
And when you read the older entries, you can see patterns you might never have noticed any other way.
- Accepting Reality
- Those with organizational power can sometimes forget that their power is limited to the organization.
Achieving high levels of organizational and personal performance requires a clear sense of those limits.
- Self-Serving Bias in Organizations
- We all want to believe that we can rely on the good judgment of decision makers when they make decisions
that affect organizational performance. But they're human, and they are therefore subject to a cognitive
bias known as self-serving bias. Here's a look at what can happen.
- Meeting Troubles: Collaboration
- In some meetings, we collaborate not in reaching objectives, but in preventing our doing so. Here are
three examples of this pattern.
See also Personal, Team, and Organizational Effectiveness and Personal, Team, and Organizational Effectiveness for more related articles.
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- And on January 29: A Framework for Safe Storming
- The Storming stage of Tuckman's development sequence for small groups is when the group explores its frustrations and degrees of disagreement about both structure and task. Only by understanding these misalignments is reaching alignment possible. Here is a framework for this exploration. Available here and by RSS on January 29.
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