| It's Good Business |
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| It's funny how people who have fucked you good always try to make your bending over to facilitate the transaction seem the only rational option. Nowhere in my life does this occur with greater frequency than at work. Somehow the idea has taken root that taking a high fastball to the head at work shouldn't be taken personally. If it happens to you at homeplate, everyone knows that you launch yourself at the offending pitcher hoping to get a piece of his overweight ass before the catcher can run you down from behind. But if it happens at work and you launch yourself across the conference table at some ass who has once again dropped the ball, leaving a steaming pile of to-do on your plate, you can just bet that your boss is going to want to have a chat about your negative attitude. |
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| Remember, it's not personal, Sonny, it's strictly business. |
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| I've been doing project management at software companies for about 7 years now. Project management is an interesting job. Roughly speaking, it's a nexus for two personality types: bullshit artists and perfectionistic control freaks. The bullshit artists are there because they don't quite have the sociopathic tendencies that would normally land their lame, non-performing asses in a sales or marketing organization. And the control freaks are there because project management is the professional point of perfect equilibrium for people whose core competency is anxiety. I happen to fall into this latter category. |
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| The thing about me is this: I can truly, deeply dislike you as a person, but if you can do your job well, I can get by that personal dislike, at least enough to work with you. You can be arrogant. You can be slovenly. You can be downright evil. What you can't be is incompetent. You might be the nicest, sweetest person in the world, but if you won't pull your own weight, if you can't do your job, if you make my life hard at work, I will watch you drown while sitting on a stack of life jackets. This I have learned about myself because experience has taught me. |
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| Example: A few years back, around '97, I was working in Lexington, MA at a medium sized software company. I was project managing the installation of a particularly uninteresting piece of Human Resources software and I had a team of technical consultants who kind-of worked for me. They call it 'matrixed in' in corporate Newspeak. It was one of these consultants who first brought to my attention that I might have a problem distinguishing between what's business and what's personal. |
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| On the morning of the day of the incident, or the day that I sometimes call "the first day I knew I was going to try and fire his stupid, weird ass", I was sitting at my desk doing some multi-threaded worrying when my phone rang. It was my client counterpart on a project I had going, a project manager at one of the nation's largest diesel engine manufacturers. She was responsible for making sure her team was online for hardware, networking and DB support when we needed them as well as coordinating just about everything else that needed to be in place for our site visit. |
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| "Hi Sandy", I said. "How is everything going?" |
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| This was the first day of a week long implementation project and it would be a good sign that everything was off to a smooth start. |
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| "Like Crap", she said. |
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| "Oh Shit", is what I thought. This was a woman in her mid 40's who had the poise, the technical chops and the all-around huevos to be a senior IT project manager at a company that makes diesel engines for trucks and tanks and god knows what else. What the hell could possibly go wrong within an hour of my guy going on-site that could rattle her? |
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| "It's Mike", she said. |
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| "What happened? Did he miss his flight?" |
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| "No, he's here." |
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| "Good. So what's up?" |
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| "We have a problem." |
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| "What's up?", I said again, never in my wildest imagination expecting what was coming. |
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| "Mike won't work with my guys." |
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| "Excuse me?", I said, having heard her clearly, but having the kind of practiced, professional reaction that lets you not say 'what the fuck!' to the customer. |
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| "Mike is having a problem with my DBA and the Network Admin." |
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| Ok, at this point, I am puckering the lips that I sit on. I become completely dialed in to this conversation. I don't know what Mike's issue is, but it's his job to suck it up, get our stuff installed, and get the check in the mail. |
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| "What kind of problem?", I asked. |
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| "He says they are insulting him in Arabic..." |
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| "WHAT THE FUCK!" |
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| "I don't know, Charlie. Maybe you want to talk to him?", she suggested. |
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| Sandy handed the phone to Mike. It turns out they were all gathered in a small conference room with Mike on one side of the table and Sandy's two IT guys on the other, glaring at each other. |
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| "Mike, what's the problem?" |
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| "These two guys are insulting me", he blurts out like a petulant fat kid. |
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| I am going to be reasonable. Maybe Mike isn't completely out of his mind. He is, after all, on my team. He's my guy. "What are they doing?", I ask him. |
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| He replies, "They are making Arab body language signs at me". |
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| Oh my god. |
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| "Mike," I ask, "are they sitting right in front of you?" |
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| "Yes", he says... |
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| "And they heard you say that?" |
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| "Yes" he says again, sounding even more like a whining fat kid than before. |
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| "And Sandy heard you too?" I ask, losing hope. |
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| "Yes", he says. Now I am back in 5th grade and I wish I could punch the obnoxious fat kid in the face. But I am going to take the high road, be managerial, focus on the goal line, all that corporate bullshit. Maybe an appeal to Mike's sense of professionalism will work. |
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| "Mike, I need you to focus on getting the install completed." |
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| "I can't", whines fatty. |
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| "Because I don't have to take this, especially from them." |
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| Ok. So the professional appeal didn't work the first time. Maybe if I try it again it will stick. |
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| "Mike, you have to ignore it. It's your job. You need to get this install squared away and get sign off from Sandy." |
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| Stifling visions of 'Lord of the Flies', I proceeded to talk Mike off the ledge and get him to agree that it would be in our mutual interest to get this install over with no matter what. After that, I asked him to hand the phone back to Sandy and began the damage control. |
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| Fast-forward to Mike's performance review. It's a couple months and several tense projects later. The short and sweet of it is that I hammered him. The simple truth was that he sucked at his job and that's what I told him. I hadn't started out with that intention, but his increasingly belligerent reaction made it easy for me to warm to the task of giving it to him without the courtesy of a reacharound. By the time I was finished, his face was a brilliant red. When it was his turn to speak, he had the look of an engorged sausage casing about to burst. He was positively fuming. |
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| He demanded examples. I gave him specific examples. He got madder. |
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| He finally blurted out a question that was the beginning of my own path to Buddha-like self-knowledge at work. "Do you know what your problem is?" he huffed in rage. |
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| "No, Mike. I don't." |
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| "Your problem is that you don't know how to separate business from personal." |
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| Bingo. Even an ass like this had something to teach me. It hit me like a brick. He had intended it to be an insult. A hurtful remark to injure my professional pride. But he was right. I didn't know how to separate issues at work from my personal feelings. Moreover, I had no interest in doing so. I had spent more then a few late nights remotely connected to client servers cleaning up messes he had created and then left. Wasn't it personal that I had been forced to cancel dinner reservations with my wife to fix his shoddy work? Didn't it personally affect me, bearing the anger of irate customers who wanted to know what the hell they were paying us $50,000 in services fees for? Didn't I take it personally that the quality of this guy's work reflected poorly on my reputation for project execution and delivery? You bet your ass I did. |
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| "You're right Mike. I do take my work personally and I do not like you screwing it up. You have made the last several months an enormous pain in the ass for me and I am done cleaning up after you. We are either going to straighten you out or you aren't going to continue working here." |
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| .................. |
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| Just about everyone is familiar with the saying 'A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single footstep.' Well, Mike was the bon voyage on a journey of workplace self-awareness, though he certainly isn't the end of the story. I have had plenty of validating experiences since then. I realized for the first time with Mike though that it was what was in my gut that made the difference. What's more personal than that? The gut check has become the yardstick by which I measure the people I work with. It's not about making mistakes. Everyone makes them, especially me. It's not about lacking skills. Everyone has more to learn. Again, I am a case in point. It is, however, about what kind of commitment you bring to work and to those you work with. If Johnny in Product Marketing does nothing but toss firebombs of crap over the fence at me with each successive project he sponsors, I know he's an ass and I don't reach for the jumper cables when I see him in the parking lot at 7pm with a dead battery. Does that make me a bad person? I don't care, because with me it's not just business, it's personal. |
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