The very word brings a chill to the spin of workers everywhere. It's the constant fear that no matter how hard you work or how well you're liked by your co workers that you're going to get screwed by not being nice to the boss. So the constant nagging question that everyone has is whether to plunge into these icy waters and try to swim for the safe shores of stable employment. And let us not delude ourselves when we mention stable employment, it's the one thing we all care about. Our generation has at long last seen the true destructive nature of an economic recession something that before our generation had never been accustomed to or had never experienced.
Milliennials had never before truly understood the true weight of economic decline until the 2008 recession which will be looked at by future generations as one of the most destructive recessions in recent memories with some calling it the quote unquote "Great Recession" or the "Lesser Depression. Millions of people lost their jobs and a substantial majority of these layoffs were individuals who had just made it into the job market.
Many forced themselves back into academia hoping that the intellectual institutions would shield them in exchange for tens of thousands of dollars worth of debt and future repayment. So it's been several years since the end of the recession and now slowly but surely these students are peeking out of their dorm rooms and parents basement in the hopes of finding gainful employment.
However, they now find themselves not in the free environment of universities or colleges or classrooms but of office cubicles and meeting rooms where middle management steers the ship and often declines any other opinion but their own, or in some cases the opinion of someone above them.
So what is a lowly new employee to do?
Free and open discussion where the pinnacle of their old classrooms and their teachers freely invited open discussion of a range of topics with very little control.
Here in lies the problem.
When I was much younger I had a much more black and white perspective. With politics, with discussion and with right and wrong. What a change a few years can make!
I've seen first hand how largely lazy and ineffective workers can and will rise in highly political workplaces (and I use the word political as in office politics) that has dominated corporate culture for quite a long time. Its very often that the hard worker is constant screwed over and is only held in place by the threat of dismissal or demotion.
Not only are good workers constantly denigrated and undermined they feel trapped in the workplace where they are constantly attacked not only by upper management (with their own goal of controlling their employees and to maximize productivity) but also what I’d surmise as employees who have solidified themselves as semi-concrete institutions within a corporate structure.
These employees through various acts of semi-competence have gained the attention of management. But to say that these employees are good workers is a misunderstanding of what their actual goals are. Their true goals are to gain both respect and power from funneling and controlling information in the workplace. This information can be as minor as a simple statement of actual fact “Bobby did a great job.” Or can be misconstrued into a different statement “Bobby did a great job but he use to be better.” These two statements side by side are two different views points with the latter being a subjective point without any real quantifiable measurement.
However, if a management official either agrees with the statement or suspects the statement to be true the power that this one employee has grows as the manager sees the employee as a penetrating voice of opinion in the workplace. Another example of an employee using factually correct statements with minor revisions of personal opinions are when they take a fellow employees criticism of upper management and enhances it in a more negative light. Example “Bobby said that moving the office copier to the end of the hall made it harder for new employees to find it.” An employee with a sharp ear and a knack for storytelling will now change the narrative to “Bobby called John an idiot for moving the copier to the end of the hall saying that new employees aren't smart enough to find it.”
This slight change in the sentence structure and an adding of a negative connotation and most importantly this employee will bring this criticisms to the attention of upper management resulting in a loss of confidence in “Bobby” but increasing the visible power that this employee has. Also if this criticism is simply stated aloud in front of upper management can force the manager to take much more drastic measures to insure that his own power is not diminished in the workplace due to individual speaking poorly of him. This employee will after many months and even years will solidify his power base in the workplace and will be seen as someone who is held in high esteem by upper management even if his actual productivity is actually lower than other employees. He will be seen as engaged in the workplace and he will be rewarded for his constant undermining of other employees by management.
However, this can descend into a war of backstabbing and proxy fights if two individuals of equal measures are drawn into a battle over power and status. This usually occurs between new inexperienced management members and established employees who have are well versed and respected in the workplace. The war which is mostly done by proxy is done through various other employees and upper management. The new manager will seek to establish his status and power by stepping on the most influential employee to show everyone in the workplace that he is worthy of his new found status in the corporation. What will follow will be weeks of infighting between the employee and manager who will both try and diminish the perceived power that manager has and will become uncooperative and openly hostile.
It should however be noted that in many cases the open salvo in the war is usually started by the newly minted manager and not the established employee. The employee who has long ago settled into his power base will only fight back if he feels a threat to his power base or if the new manager does not respect and acknowledge the power of this established employee.
If the new manager decides as I've stated before to diminish the power of the established employee to force everyone around him to respect his authority then the employee will strike back. The opening salvo from this employee will be both harsh and in some cases an overblown reaction to his long solidified power. The employee will use both cunning linguistics and conversation tactics to force the management type to say disparaging things about other managers or employees. If this process does not work then the employee will simply manufacture false statements and spread them as truth to upper management and employees who will believe him since he rarely if ever is known to lie. These false or semi-false statements will diminished the credibility of the manager and will damage relations with other employees.
The employee will however, remain discontent at the lack of process in the managers fall from grace specifically because the fractures nature of the workplace make it nearly impossible for upper management to disceren who is truly incompetent and damaging to the company meaning that few if any terminations actually occur, they instead rely on heavy turnover to accomplish their own goals and productivity targets. These two individuals will slug it out and for the most part they will keep their own power base but the long standing question of this article is whether or not to play.
With this huge and often vocal fight will push less vocal employees into the shadows and they will become inherently invisible to upper management and when the time comes to trim the fat at work these productive and hardworking but quiet employees will find themselves on the chopping block and in danger of losing their jobs.
Tune in next time where I talk about why I use to not play office politics and why I play it now.
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