Tuesday 5 February 2013

Thought Picnic: Welcome to the global enterprise


Working out the system
Work environments present interesting challenges to people as they walk and first try to understand, then appreciate and maybe adapt to the way things are done.
Indeed, you meet new people and you engage them tentatively to decide how best you will be able to work together and hope that in that developing relationship you will either adapt and be subsumed or bring a new perspective to things that might just change things for the better.
In all the places I have worked, I believe the force of personality is crucial to making a useful impact whilst contributing to the team and work dynamic.
People over process
Many times, the situation is about people, the amenable, the amiable, the pliable, the misunderstood, the indifferent, the antithetical, the impossible, the eccentric, the genius and sometimes the sociopath.
Each needs a model of interaction that for me should appeal to the neutral if negative or make the best to accentuate the positive.
Working in the Information Technology industry, I know that there is much you can do with computers but I do not believe that basic management issues should be offloaded unto computing solutions when what is needed is a conversation, an email or some resolution where someone in authority has decided to assume their responsibilities and operate in the office that they occupy.
However, simple processes get unnecessarily complicated by people who politicise issues impeding the advancement and progress we all require to do our jobs whilst they think they are doing their effectively.
The politics of inertia
We get snowed under by puny power plays along with the constant avalanches of email that are a multitude of words and an absence of activity with the ones needing support left to wonder about the institutionalised dysfunction that has been allowed to fester to be the point of grinding everything to a halt and filling all reasonable people with utter exasperation.
You get to a point where the smartest thing is to allow the system to sort itself out else an email that is as forthright as it should be might well be the nuclear option to crack heads together, put boots in backsides, yield solutions but array enemies for a future encounter.
In the end, when your patience just about runs out, what needs to be done, needs to be done – welcome to the global enterprise.

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