Understanding the power of communication matters

It is Babel out there

It would usually happen, technologies that overlap, strong expertise in the separate technologies that seep into egotistical posturing, then exacerbated by a very political setting that engenders silos of indifference whilst all working for the same organisation.

What you get is a tinderbox of conflict and reverberation played out in emails with escalating intransigence as more and more people who already have enough trouble to deal with are drawn into it with the hope that one would prevail and other is vanquished.

Yet, I do not indulge in these power plays and that is what it sometimes demonstrates to gain any particular benefit than to see that what in my reasonable professional opinion gets done. This is where communication, clarity, persuasion, courtesy, and evidence matter. I will not propose without the supporting documentation and references to buttress the point.

The compelling urge to respond

Then, I rely on the reasonableness of my argument to eventually persuade those who can engage to facilitate the necessary. After a number of exchanges, a response came back that left me quite exasperated. Having conceded that the viewpoint was acceptable the rest bordered on infantile invective.

I could have immediately replied, but I could see no further need to conduct that conversation, I left it to my managers to take to the next level and that is what I asked them to do. Generally, I am no fan of needless meetings that yield no progress. I would rather just give my managers the information they need to thrash out the essential compromises and we can get on with what we need to do.

Just let it work

As the email cooled off for a few days and over the weekend, I had begun to craft an adequate response in my head that I began to write on Tuesday, I was not convinced of the need to send it, so, it lay in my Drafts folder.

A meeting scheduled for yesterday was postponed to today and it was my intention to maintain silence until when prompted. I could not have anticipated the developments when concessions were fully made with even more support than we anticipated. All this arrived at on the review of their systems and realising that our request was as reasonable as it could ever be.

At their behest we now have ample opportunity that probably would never have been possible without instigation, that first went completely contrary and sour to cooperation and acquiescence. That’s why I do what I do, I am a geek of sorts but it takes a different kind of political communication strategy to get radical change to a point where it gets the full support of competing interests and eventual implementation.

The politics of arrogance in the office

My mercenary career

I have been doing office politics for longer than I care to be concerned, it is probably why I have preferred the role of being a consultant rather than an employee, there is a sense of independence it entails without having to pander to hierarchies of management and human resource departments.

Obviously, you still somehow report to someone within the organisation and it is the organisation’s decision to either retain or terminate your contract. I would be the first to concede that I am not your pliant mercenary, supine as to be invertebrate and given to masochistic tendencies.

Autonomy matters and where it is non-existent, I would well be on to something else than endure the situation. Gosh! I have standards and the traditional ones of respect, courtesy, and consideration rank highly in my book.

A nasty trait of arrogance

Quite recently, I have run against a cohort of intellectual arrogance that deadens the capacity for the comprehension of basic facts. They have decided in their fiefdom that they must retain absolute control that even the most reasonable argument leaves them unpersuadable. It is a sorry sight to watch.

When engagement for understanding, cooperation and facilitation simply elicits infantile truculence you are left with the wise saying of Peter Drucker, the once upon a time eminent management consultant, “discover where your intellectual arrogance is causing disabling ignorance and overcome it.”

Not the easiest thing to do, but it goes a long way to fostering professional and work relationships if you willing to listen, understand, appreciate and allow. There is always another perspective to the way you see or do things if you get off your high horse.

I hate being a pawn

An unwilling pawn

I did not see this coming, I thought I was an important piece on a chess-board only to find out that I am being played like a pawn about to be taken off the board en passant.

I had been looking forward to my new role which we were about to flesh out in the month of January before it starts on the first working day of February.

The promise or what I thought it offered was an opportunity to move out from under the project management that had stifled my objectives with inertia, lack of vision, incompetence, self-preservation and cack-handedness.

I was to lead this group until I had a meeting on Thursday with the project manager who probably does not know that he is the main reason why I refused to take up a permanent contract in July and put in my notice in October.

Outsmarted

Somehow, as we were realigning the focus and developing aims for the new team, I should have sensed that the interest and involvement of the project manager was a manoeuvre for new relevance at my expense.

The director I thought I would be reporting to had offered the leadership of the team to the project manager whilst I was on holiday and I was to assume a consultancy role.

Errr! I do not think that is what I had in mind at all, it would not work because I do not expect a Damascene conversion to dynamism to help me achieve what I hoped to achieve.

My marketing literature is really now on the market, it would appear, January the thirty-first is my last day here after 17 months.

I hate being a pawn and if I should be a pawn I should a significant one on the board, ready to capture a helpless principal piece or be promoted to a principal piece. I am off this chess board, I need to be in another game.