Tag Archives: Work

Life Lessons: How to deal with bullies at work and outside….

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I’ve mentioned before, in this new place I am now working, I have been having issues at work, but I’ve never really elaborated on it. Today I am going to talk about some of what I am going through and what I have learned from my research on how to deal with such issues. Maybe someone else can benefit from it.

 

 

I have a colleague on the same team, who is junior to me, both in the number of years of experience we have as well as in the hierarchy of the organisation. For some reason, from the day I joined the organisation, this person has been borderline rude with me. They would be careful to be sweet and nice when in the presence of others, it was only when they were with me and maybe an intern who was working with them, would the nastiness surface. I was new to the organisation and I didn’t know how things are run. This person had been here for around a year before I joined. Anytime I asked them anything, it would be met with a curt, “I am busy” but they were not busy to chit chat with others during the time they were supposed to be busy. This went for around a month, but till that time it was done very passively. After a month of this, I sent this person an email about something which was not in both our job scopes, but which we had to do to help out. My email to the person was that when they were away, I will step in and the very rude reply I got was it was not their job too and so I was not doing them any favours. I had copied the email to our manager and the reply was also sent to everyone.

 

At some point, I did bring up this person’s attitude to our manager, but till date, I have not seen a resolution of the issue. I am not sure if the manager has managed to speak to this person, but since I don’t really see any improvement in attitude, I am guessing no.

So what do I do in such a case? I decided to read up and am following these points. It may be useful to others who are recipients of workplace bullying which is why I decided to blog about it.

 

When faced with a bully at work, we can either leave that toxic environment, stay quiet in the hope that it will blow away or confront the bully. Since I was new, leaving was not an option, I did speak to our manager, who didn’t do much to mitigate the issue and I didn’t want to confront the bully, but wanted to make sure I was no longer bullied

 

I first stopped talking to the bully. I didn’t interact much with them unless it was work specific and even then, I made sure I always tried to email them with a copy to our manager. This way, any rude or bullying behaviour would be out in the open and also documented since my problem was that this bully was sweet in front of others and rude when it was just us interacting. You could also keep a record of all interactions with the bully and if possible document every interaction.

After you have gathered the information, try to make time with the bully and speak calmly and emotionlessly. I need to work on this as I tend to get emotional in such times, but take deep breaths if that helps and speak to the bully. This approach may or may not work, depending on how the bully rolls, so prepare to take a step back and come back with reinforcements (aka your manager).

 

Usually, the perpetrator in a bullying incident is mostly intimated by you, either by what you bring to the table in terms of experience or job knowledge or what they stand to lose in terms of how your work will affect their standing in the organisation. I suspect in my case this is what happened. The bully in my instance probably thought I was a threat to them, though how I don’t know and used rude and disrespectful tones and language to compensate for that.

 

Another thing that usually works is not to stoop down to the bully’s level. It’s very tempting (believe me, I know), to respond with rude behaviour when faced with such behaviour, but I now believe in this, as Michelle Obama famously said, “When they go low, we go high”! Respond to rude behaviour with extreme politeness. If the rude behaviour is via email, I go very formal and polite and when a senior person sees the email exchange, the contrast between the two tones cannot be more obvious!

Lastly, I’d say don’t take this rudeness and bullying personally and over analyse everything (I am guilty of this). It is possible that the bully might have felt slighted over something you said or did, which is why they are behaving the way they do. I suspect this could have happened in my case also. In the last month, maybe I said or did (or didn’t say or do) something which may have been important to this person. Maybe once you figure out the reason why the bully behaved that way, behaviours on both sides can change. I do plan to do exactly that and see if I can figure out why my bully is behaving in such a way and see if I can turn the situation around.

 

Do you have any other way to work around a bully? I’d love to hear your ideas!

 

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It’s been slightly more than three weeks since I started working and I got reacquainted with the beauty that is Office Politics!

 

For those who don’t know, Office politics “are the strategies that people play to gain an dvantage, personally or for a cause they support”. The term often has a negative connotation, in that it refers to strategies people use to seek advantage at the expense of others or the greater good.

Love it, revel in it, hate it or just play along with it, office politics are a staple in every organisation, be it a small organisation or a large multinational company. Someone who wants to be successful in his/her career needs to know how to play the game and eventually become a master at it!

 

I’ve seen different forms of the games people play at work and sometimes am amazed by the audacity of some of the tactics some people employ to get ahead. I always wonder if these people are wasted in the role they are in, they may have been better off as politicians instead of being a corporate slave.

 

 

To win at this game and come out smelling of roses, here are some strategies you should use, preferably as soon as you join a new organisation:

 

Map your organisation

In most organisations, the real power is not where the formal power lies. For example, maybe someone who has been there for a long time and knows the organisation inside-out, but who is fairly junior in position, may weld more soft power than the head of the organisation. This person may be able to influence people across the organisation and so has more power as he/she can people towards or away from someone.

So when you join a new organisation, watch for a couple of weeks and find out who the real influencers are and make them like you too.

 

Build social relations across the hierarchy

Make sure that the social relations you build in the organisation across formal hierarchies, you should be friends from people across the strata, most junior to most senior. This helps you to win people across the organisation and also know what is happening elsewhere in the organisation. When you are friends with people, they tend to help you, not only with information, but also with things that may be new to you or things you may be unfamiliar with.

I had a colleague like that, this person was super friendly and made friends easily and across the organisation. This person was also very helpful and would go out of their way to help people and so used this currency to build relations and also get the gossip from across departments and sections.

 

Be Neutral

At work, it is very easy to get caught up in gossip and eventually end up taking sides. This could misfire horribly. So the best thing to do is to be completely neutral. Even when people rant about other people in front of you, just nod neutrally and move away from there as soon as possible. When you take sides in any issue, it will inevitably come to bite you in the back.

 

Be Objective and professional

When office politics comes to play, personalities are involved and we may be mad at someone or the other. At times like this, maybe you want to vent out to someone and this most likely takes the shape of a gossip and veers to the person’s personal characteristics. Don’t give in to this! Even if you win this war, you will ultimately lose the larger battle.

Be professional in your attitude and your exchanges with your superiors, peers and subordinates at all times. This attitude will pay off in more ways than one.

 

So here you have four ways in which you can play the office politics game and come out a winner. Do you have any more strategies which help in navigating the minefield which is office politics? I’d to hear from you in the comments below.

Job Search Woes: An Interview Episode

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While I am actively looking for a new position, I thought I’d do a series on job search woes. This will document the random and sometimes funny and weird people I meet while looking for a new position. Here’s the latest one….

Earlier this week I went for an interview, which should rate as one of the weirdest ones I’ve ever gone for!

Early in the week, I chanced upon a position in one of the job boards I frequent which really appealed to me. This was very similar to a previous position I was doing and I could do the job easily. Plus the position would also stretch me professionally (or so it seemed) and so very excitedly I applied for the position. This was around 10 am in the morning. Sometime around 1:30 pm in the afternoon, I get a call from someone asking me if I was interested in coming down for an interview. I don’t think they mentioned the name of the company (or perhaps I didn’t hear it?), but I agreed and we discussed dates and times and agreed to meet the next morning. Soon an email arrived from the person I spoke to earlier confirming the interview, but again no company name, just the time and address.

I reversed searched the number from where the phone call came and got the name of the company. When I logged into the job board, I was very excited to see it was for the job I had applied that morning. I did notice that the same company had multiple positions open at that point, but didn’t really check them out. I was very excited thinking that they had seen my resume and since I checked all the items they needed for the position, decided to call me for an interview so soon. Boy, was I to be proven wrong! I spent the rest of the day preparing for the interview.

During my research of the company, I came across some points which made me a bit nervous. Like this place, I had worked briefly at another place which had a similar structure and was essentially a one-man show. The owner/founder called all the shots and if they were unhappy with someone, out they went, justified or not. I hated working there from my second week and could not wait to get out. I am sure I do not want to be in a similar environment.

The next day I reached on time for the interview. When I arrive at the venue, while searching for the stairs to get up to the office, I saw two women seated at some chairs downstairs in the open. From the body language, it seemed that one lady was interviewing the other. My feeling was that this was my interviewer and the person they were interviewing was the person before me. I did wonder why they could not do the interview in the office but walked to the office to find out.

At the office, which was a small open-plan office, I was met with 4 youngsters (early to mid-twenties, all of whom from the accents and the way they spoke English seemed to come from the same Asian country). I was asked to fill up an employment form, which had no space to write anything (even the space for telephone numbers was woefully inadequate). So I wait there for the lady to come up to interview me. She comes up after a bit and then starts my interview. She asked me to go downstairs with her which I did. Now comes the fun part.

While walking down to the chairs arrangement, she starts by asking me if I have sales before. I found the question a bit funny because the position I had applied for was not a sales position. I thought she was pulling it from my resume and started talking about all the times I did sales and what I did in the different roles.

She keeps talking more about sales, asking me about big achievements and targets when she realises that I’ve applied for another position. She turns to me saying, “Oh, I see you’ve come for this position and not the other one”. I say yes and start talking about why I am a good fit for that position. So then she starts reading my resume and can’t find the information I am talking about. That’s when I ask her if she has a copy of my resume and she says, “Yes, I have this”, showing me a print-out. The print out was a screen shot from someone’s phone with just the top quarter of the first page of my resume (I have a three -page resume). The paper she had just had the accomplishments and core competencies, with nothing of what I had done previously. So I laughed and told her this is just a fraction of my resume and asked her if I could send her a copy. I didn’t have a soft copy with me but emailed her a forward from another application. All this while talking to her about myself.

Later, on reading my resume, she asked if I was interested in this other sales position. When she explained the position, I did say it was interesting, but I am clearly not very interested in it. She also spoke about working late on a regular basis, but I was quite pissed off by then, so I told her that while working late was not an issue with me, I am a big proponent of work-life balance. I also brought up my India trip in November (even though I wan’t going to at this stage), but I wanted to put all my cards on the table so if they do want to proceed further, they have all the information. As with all companies, salary also seems to be an issue here, with her asking if I will reduce my asking salary.

We quickly wrapped up the interview in less than 30 minutes (including the time I took to send her my resume) and she said she will speak to the CEO and see if she can try to arrange for a second interview with the CEO based on my resume for the position I applied for.

What was so strange to me was that it looked like they’ve just called all candidates who applied for an interview, without even going through their resumes. Second, they can’t even print out a legit, full copy of the resume which the job board would have sent to them. Third, they don’t even know the position the candidate has applied for!

I’ve pretty much written off this company and am not expecting anyone to call back. But the position (as it sounds on paper) was fascinating and if it is as it looks like, it’ll be something I’d love to do. So let’s see what happens. So far, they’ve not gotten back to me, though I suspect they won’t.

Ah well, c’est la vie….

Job Search Woes

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As you all know (reading my weekly rants), I’ve been actively looking for a new job the last few months. As it happens, nothing has yet materialized, but I have been mulling about this for the past few days.

 

 

In addition to corporate organisations, I have also been applying to educational institutions and government agencies. Most of these have a form that you have to fill in, which includes your credentials. These credentials include transcripts and marks for all the subjects you gave exams for from as far as the equivalent of your O and A levels. I understand that if you are a fresh graduate applying for your first job, these marks would make a difference to the hiring manager, especially if the position is in your field of expertise and your marks reflect your understanding of the subject.

But what if the position in question is for someone with a couple (or more) years experience? Why would your ‘O’, or ‘A’, or even graduate degree marks and grades matter? Most likely than not (except for some specialised fields), the person’s educational qualifications have nothing to do with the position in question. I mean a marketing or admissions officer would not have studied anything of this sort in school? At the most, the most relevant qualification in question to the position should be taken into consideration when asking for transcripts.

 

I can never understand this obsession with irrelevant grades here (though I am not sure how this works elsewhere). Recently the government made much-needed changes to the PSLE exams (which BB & GG went through last year) and the goal is not to compare children against each year and remove the dreaded T-score but allow for a more holistic educational experience. But with this in their lives 10-15 years down the line, what message does that send to children?

 

Another thing which really bugs me no end is the ghosting by companies. When you send applications for a position, you mostly don’t hear back from them, unless you have been short-listed for an initial interview. While I understand this, given the sheer number of applications each position must receive, what I don’t understand is a similar stand when they call applicants for an interview. Unless you are the successful applicant, you will have no idea on the status of your application – it’s all floating in the ether! Surely when companies take the time to speak to an applicant to gauge if he/she are a good fit for the organisation, then surely, they can take 5 minutes of their time to let the applicant know if they make the cut or not.

 

After going through years of my applications being lost in space, I’ve learnt not to take anything for granted. I will consider the job mine, only after signing on the dotted line and perhaps completing the probation period. After all, anytime between the signing of the contract and becoming permanent, the company is still within its means to say goodbye to me summarily.

What about you? Do you have any interesting job search woes? I’d love to hear from you in the comments section…

TGIF

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This whole week, I’ve been in a funk. It’s 80% work related and another 20% stress over GG & BB’s exams.

Please feel free to not read today’s post as its mostly a rant and also I want to get it off my chest. I’ve found that writing it down helps me do this the best otherwise I tend to brood about it all day long and screw up my days and nights.

OK, here’s my 80% rant. If you remember I applied for the internal job and within a few days the recruiter’s assistant got in touch for a phone interview with my current boss. Then two days later she called me to cancel saying since he is traveling they will reschedule it this week when N, my boss is in town. I waited and even started work on something to show him during the interview. This week i waited for the assistant, lets call her J to confirm the interview date and time since i knew N will be in office this week.

When nothing came by till Wednesday, I reached out to J to check. I was told N is busy and she will get back to me. I know N is busy – interviewing people for the role, both physical and phone interviews!. In fact he also spoke to me in passing about that saying we need to talk. But this was after i told him that J had cancelled the phone interview. From what I understood, N was interviewing people via phone the week my interview was supposed to have been done.

Now i really don’t know what to do – am I not in the consideration at all? Or i am in the race, but since N has seen what I am capable of, he would prefer to screen the others for a first round? This is so confusing and I hate to feel like this!

I am OK if I am out of the consideration totally, but would have appreciated if someone told me that so i don’t build any expectations. This is not like other interviews where you don’t hear from companies (although how long does it take someone to drop the applicant a one liner about the status of their application is beyond me) but since this is the place I work with, I will ultimately know who the successful candidate is and will be working with him/her in the near future!

I’m trying to be positive, but somehow this week has been difficult. Thank Goodness today is Friday. I can’t wait for the week to end. Monday is a new week and hopefully a more positive week for me.