Corporate Universe

A little while back, I read a book called "Work would be great, if it weren’t for the People" by Ronna Lichtenberg. As you might suspect, it offered advice on how to deal with office politics. While I found a majority of the scenarios presented in the book to be over the top , and the solutions offered far too simplistic, I must acknowledge that I found some valuable advice in a brief segment of the book on being new on the job.

Lichtenberg states that when you first start working, you should be wary of the person that immediately wants to be your best friend. I ended my first week at work thinking that my co-workers are the absolute nicest people in the universe. Not true. That is not to say they are evil, but that they are not any more or less nice than people in general. I think that in the corporate universe , people’s true colors are often well hidden beneath diplomatic euphemisms facilitated by the need to be "professional" at all times. I now realize that people who wanted to be my best friend, at first, certainly had their agenda.

Secondly, I think that it is very important to not set a predictable pattern for lunch. At first, I wanted to get to know everybody as quickly as possible so whenever I was invited to lunch, I would accept. However, then I fell into a pattern of where I would go to lunch with my team just about everyday and if I did not want to go one day, I felt compelled to have a detailed explanation of why not. My lunch hour is mine. On most days, I would rather spend it reading a good book than engaging in mindless small talk & gossip with co-workes with whom I have a grand total of 1 thing in common: work.

I have finally managed to get myself out of the clique, but I think it would have been so much easier if I never allowed myself to become a part of the clique in the first place.

My current manager is leaving the company next Tuesday. Everyone is supposedly sad and say they will miss her. But, it got me thinking about how many people are actually sad. As in, after 5+ years of working at a place, how many real friends do you end up with?

Sadly, I feel like I could never be friends with a co-worker on a level comparable to my friends outside of work. One of the main reasons why is that there is always a hierarchy at work- somebody is always in charge of somebody and there are very few friendships that can withstand a blatant inequality in status.

Secondly, if two people happen to be on the same step of the corporate ladder, then they are inevitably in competition with each other to climb to the top. This is unlike competition among friends in school because on exams, you get the score you get and one of you ‘wins’ the competition fair and square. But in big offices, nothing is remotely as straight forward as that. When it comes time for a promotion, there is not any quantifiable measure of who is a better candidate, a lot is based on who thinks what of whom. Rather than test scores, it is as though your grade is dependent on whom the professor thinks is smarter. Getting someone to think you are smart requires a different skill set than being smart.

Perhaps I am being overly cynical.

Maybe it is just this company?

I suppose I will find out as I advance from AUNTY (Read previous entry) to granny 😉