标题: 【《ChaseDream Career》十二月刊选文摘录】之职场江湖“Humble and helpful” [打印本页] 作者: Career 时间: 2012-12-10 11:17 标题: 【《ChaseDream Career》十二月刊选文摘录】之职场江湖“Humble and helpful” Humble and helpful
A while back, a good friend of mine from college was asked to transfer to a different department because she didn't quite get along with her boss.She described her boss as "stupid, lazy and always taking credit for her work."My other friend, Sarah, recently was asked to leave the company immediately after the CEO found someone to replace her. She was hired by the prestigious private equity firm that owns the company to "assist CEO with daily operation." From very early on, Sarah told me stories of how "unprofessional" her CEO was,and how he had a strong favoritism towards his own people, who were just as incompetent as the CEO. Just last week, one of our senior designers resigned without saying goodbye. When I worked with her several months ago on a rather challenging project, she was always complaining about how bad our new project leader was at managing clients and how lazy our new interaction designer was.
All of these women are extremely smart, talented, and can probably solve difficult business problems, but why is it when it comes to people-related issue, they give up so easily and turn into a whining 3-year old baby ?
I was like one of them about 2 years ago and probably still am to a certain degree if I don't observe my behavior carefully. It was the first time I was fully in charge of a large scale project. My boss (let's just call her Jane) had just been promoted to her new role. Jane was a rather controlling manager. She would attempt to do what I was suppose to do because she didn't feel what I was doing was meeting her standard. This created a lot of confusion to my direct reports as they would receive directions from both me and Jane. At the same time, I wanted Jane to spend less time managing the day to day work and more time on communicating with our client's senior management team. Instead of really trying to work things out with Jane, I escalated this problem to our director, hoping that he could interfere and help to resolve the tension between me and Jane. He had an 1-on-1 talk with Jane and encouraged her to give me a bit more room.
Things improved a bit for the next few days, however, the tension between us quickly turned up again. The problem that our client had come to us for wasn't very difficult to solve but our team couldn't align ourselves to a solution. Our director decided that it's probably better that I rolled off from the project; Jane led the team directly and someone more senior than Jane to manage clients. Looking back, instead of trying to support Jane in her new role, I spent most of time thinking and complaining to others how terrible of a leader Jane was. This mentality guided how I interacted and treated her. She must have felt my hostile behavior although I never openly challenged her ability.
I learned two important lessons from this experience. This first one is that If I can't solve people related issue, I can't solve any issue and the second one was there is absolutely no, zero, nada benefit if you maintain a poor relationship with your boss. No matter where I work or what type of work I do, there is always going to be someone who won't behave the way I have hoped but this person has some influence on the success of my work. I can choose to let this person become a bottleneck to my success or I can learn to deal with him. This realization was important for me because that's when I changed my mindset from “I am a victim of a terrible boss/team member/client" to "I must acquire skills to deal with such situation." As much as I want my boss to be supportive, my team member to be capable and my client to be helpful, sometimes things just don't go as I wish and I have absolutely no control over how these people act. The only thing I can do is to just accept them for whom they are yet find ways to influence them. After all, I am far from perfect so why should the people I work be?
But I gotta tell you, the shift in mentality is the easier part, learning the "soft skills" to deal with the situation is a much harder part. To be honest, I don't think I have master this yet and it's very likely that I will need to spend the rest of my life learning this skill. If you are really interested in working on your people skill, I highly recommend Dale Carnegie's all-time classic book "How to win friends and influence others & how to stop worrying and start living" In this book Dale suggested his readers to record every mistake they make on peoplerelated matters and review these mistakes every weekend until they no longer make them. This sounds like a lot of hard work but I am quite convinced that is the process that one needs to go through to change old habits.
But if keeping notebook and being so self-reflective all the time is not your thing, I find maintaining a humble and grateful attitude goes a long way when dealing with people issue. I am not saying that you can't be aggressive or lower your standard, I am only suggesting you to think outside of yourself, do more for your boss, team, project and the company. Instead of thinking you are smarter or assume your answer is better than others, be humble and helpful. I think this works probably because when one is humble and helpful, one inspires people around him to reciprocate with the similar behavior. When everyone is humble and helpful, that's when collaboration will truly blossom. And when collaboration blossoms, you are more likely to achieve what you set out to accomplish.