"Can I call you Stef?"

No. No you can’t, with few exceptions which I will comment on shortly.

Stef is informal. It implies a certain level of familiarity. In the professional world, you may not call me Stef. I will correct you. And if you do it again, I will deliver a succinct, yet terse, reminder. It doesn’t matter that I’ve worked for the same company for 20+ years. It doesn’t matter how many projects we’ve been on together. It doesn’t matter if you’re my favorite barista at Starbucks. If our relationship is strictly professional, meaning we’ve never traded hat sizes over a martini, you’re not “Stef” worthy. Sorry. Don’t take it personal. I simply prefer Stefanie.

Exceptions to the Stef rule.

1. You are a blood relative. Blood. Not marriage. An in-law can acquire Stef privileges but only if you can prove you know the correct spelling of my name. Hint. There is no “ph”.
2. You are my legalized spouse.
3. I’ve known you for a ridiculous number of years, which means we’re besties or pretty good friends. (Kel, Carlson, Carol, Janet, Tam, Jacquie, Cindy, Lisa, Graz, Scott, Kev). It probably also means we have traded hat sizes, sipped a few drinks (maybe a few too many), shopped, cried, laughed until we almost peed our pants (maybe we did, I won’t say), gave honest feedback about each other’s bad fashion choices, shopped for shoes, swimsuits, lingerie, watched movies, cooked, baked, helped each other out of tough spot and know each other’s secrets.

You get the idea. If you don’t fall into one of the three categories, “Stef” is like nails on a chalkboard. I start to twitch and the hair on the back of my neck stands at attention. If you do you fall in the aforementioned categories and you call me Stef, I don’t even notice. It’s all good.

Interviewing

I've worked for the same company for 21 years.

That's a long time.

Longer than I've been married.

Double decades.

Long.

For reasons, which are unclear, I decided to apply to promotion. Wait, you say? A promotion? Apply for a promotion? Aren't promotions usually just given when deserved.

Apparently yes...to everyone else except me.  Now I don't want to be one of "those employees" who thinks they are all that and a bag of chips and should be promoted because they are more deserving then other employees.  I've been around the corporate block long to enough to know that when manager wants to bump someone up the corporate food chain, it happens. Auto-magically.  There is a tap-tap on the shoulder and Voila! Someone (else) has been bumped into double digit profit sharing.  I have a combination of phenomonally bad luck and bad timing when it comes to "right place at the right time" career syndrome.

Oh. Is my bitterness shining through.  Sorry. I know. I know. Sour grapes. But it's my blog and if you don't like it, I'll take my ball and go home!

So there!

The quick backstory. My department has folks that have slightly different levels of the same job. A higher graded position opened and I applied. Same job that I am doing today - just more money. Truly. The same. The same boss too. Same. 

Now if my manager had her druthers she would have probably just promoted me already - but her manager,  who is a tool and has yet to befall a non-fatal but slightly disfiguring accident, demands that God and everybody be interview for this position.  This includes external applicants. Don't even get me started on how I will feel if this position ends up being filled externally.

And so I get an interview.

Interviewing is roughly on par with taking a mind numbing math exam. There is alot of pressure to remember the correct formula for the perfect interview. The right answers solved quickly and expertly delivered with the right balance of perkiness and positivity. 

I'm pretty sure being flogged for 45 minutes wouldn't have been as painful.

Then...to add insult to injury...as if this process hasn't gone on long enough, it will be another month before a decision is made.  I applied in July. Interivew in October...decision sometime before I am dead and buried.

Or so I hope.

I've Fallen down the Project Hole

I have. For real. A combination project hole (the real job that pays the mortgage) and tye dye hole (the fun hobby that keeps me in pedicures).

I'll be back shortly.

I will.

Promise.

And it will be dazzling.

Hand to God.

Dumb things managers say

Perhaps it’s my age, but I have less and less tolerance for managers that are promoted to a level beyond their incompetence and inflict their idiocy on the working cogs of the world.

This installment of dumb things managers say includes an exchange between myself and one of the managers in our sister location. This occurred at our painful “teambuilding” torture session recently:

Manger: “How long have you been in our department”

 Me: “2 years. Prior to that I spent 10 years in Marketing, and was in Operations before that.”

 Manager: “That’s interesting. What role did you like better?”

 Me: “That’s hard to answer. They are so different.”

 Manager “This would be an opportunity for you to do some sucking up.”


Me: Dumbfounded but recovered nicely with a very diplomatic take the high-road-kind of answer.


Needless to say, the manager in question does a lot of sucking up.

As if you hadn’t guessed.

This is yet another blog entry about Corporate America trying to do the right thing, but falling flat on its face.

Thud.

Teambuilding is one of those corporate buzzwords that invariably make its way into every employee survey and/or managers annual performance goals.

1. Build your team.
2. Create inclusion.
3. Make sure that when people come to work every day it’s a great big warm fuzzy.

First off: There is a reason they call it work and they pay you to do it. I only have to moderately tolerate the people I work with. We don’t have to be besties.

Second: Teambuilding can't be forced.  Yet, misguided managers across the land think that you can toss a bunch of people from two different locations who share like jobs into the same room for a few hours, feed them pizza and expect them all to “friend” each other on facebook. Sorry, not happening.

I was recently a victim of the forced teambuilding pizza lunch experiment.

P-A-I-N-F-U-L.

From the 3 hour long car ride down to the neutral location to the teambuilding exercise, to the pizza lunch, to the 3 hour long car ride back home.

Please baby Jesus – let it be over.

And then the pain was followed up with….wait for it….a survey to share our feelings.

Please kill me now.

Pass me a gun so I can shoot myself. And if you don’t have a gun, hurl a few bullets at me. Maybe one of the bullets will break the skin and I’ll die from a nasty infection.

A few bits of advice from an experienced “team member”; the following team building tactics don’t work:

1. The team lunch. I think I’ve sufficiently beaten this one into the ground.
2. “Guess who I am” surveys; participants answer questions about themselves and we all have to guess who it is. Because – gee, when 30 of the 35 people on our cross-location team list “Christmas” as their favorite holiday…that’s a dead giveaway to the identities of people I’ve never talked laid eyes on.  This also includes the ever popular “two truths and a lie” and let’s not forget the sugary sweet “guess the baby picture.”
3. Anything via conference call where the audio is crappy at best and the video shows a wide angle of a conference room. You can’t feel the teambuilding love when one can only hear every third word and the people on the other end look like ants.
4. Team Goals. These are made up initiatives usually at the department level to address some problem that really isn’t a problem, like lack of teambuilding. I’m not kidding here. There was an actual committee, which used real work hours to brainstorm solutions for turning two units into best friends forever. I couldn’t make this up if I tried.

I appreciate the concept of trying to get these two team to mesh and gel. I do. This is not lost on me. I am not that heartless. But honest-to-pete; people have to get to know each other a little more organically. They need to be on projects together. Working together through a real project not a pretend project manufactured by the kumbaya fairy is how it should be done.

For the record, the team building committee did suggest that one team building option was to pair folks from different units on the same project. Management responded with how that was not "cost effective", but we can spend all kinds of time driving employees hither and yon for some forced teambuilding.

Head slap.

I guess I should be grateful there wasn’t a ropes course involved.

I might have been left swinging.

Stuff I like – Pea Pod Magnets by Polpette Clay

I’ve had this shop ear-marked as one of my “favorites” on etsy.com for some time now, but I never had occasion to buy a pea pod magnet. Three peas in a pod are symbolic of a certain amount of closeness. Be it family, kids or friends. It’s also a bit kitschy. But I like kitsch.

Polpette Clay sat in my etsy favorites list unloved for quite sometime. And then something amazing happened. Well, amazing is a big word, but I was on a project at work with two other women and one of the ladies made a comment about how we were just like “three peas in a pod.” This statement was met with a fair amount of snarky giggling between us, since the project in question was a heinous compliance project required by the federal government,  so it has about as much appeal as a lanced boil.

Horrible project content not-with-standing, I had an epiphany! I would order my colleagues (and myself of course) one of these cute little pea pod magnets as a memento of our time spent together enduring the pain of this particular federal compliance project.

In one fell swoop I could cement the bonds of teambuilding in corporate America and buy handmade. Smells like a win-win to me.

The magnets are cute. I mean ridiculously cute. And brightly colored. Bright and cute. And whimsical. What’s not to love? And I do like peas even when they don’t have super cute smiley faces. But these do. Bright, cute and smiley.

Buy unique. Buy handmade.

The Pain of Employee Satisfaction

My company administers an “employee satisfaction survey” every other year. It’s a respectable idea. Ask your employees a lot of questions, get some feedback and make some changes. Right?

Sort of.

This week alone I’ve endured several hours of survey results which will be followed by several more hours of in-depth discussion about why morale on our team is 10% favorable. For those of you playing along at home – 10% favorable is not a good news message.

I am personally of the opinion that if morale is below a certain threshold for any department, some type of warning signal should be sounded in the president’s office. A flair should be shot off. I mean, really. This is a group of reasonably intelligent, dedicated IT professionals clinging to the last shreds of professional sanity. Someone toss out a lifeline for Pete sakes.

Instead we are being asked to form “committees” to “identify possible solutions” for improving said morale. Now call me crazy, but morale isn’t something that can be fixed from the bottom up. Pretty sure it’s a top down issue. And frankly, I’m pretty exhausted dancing around all the politically correct terms for saying the reason our team is miserable is because our department manager is an insensitive gas bag that has no business managing people in a corporate setting. I mean let’s be honest. Actually being “honest” would be a career limiting move.

So instead we call sit around, are unfailingly polite and politically correct whilst sharing our feelings. Sharing is overrated. I’m tired of sharing. I no longer wish to share. I simply want the giant hook to appear stage left and yank this guy of the managerial stage. Ba-da-boom.

I was brave and asked the question, what the “current management team thought about the results”. There are some pretty low numbers. There was some skirting around the issue that the gas bag in question was of the opinion the respondents are just a bunch of whiners.

Yeah. That’s a morale killer. Feign interest in obtaining your employees feedback and then when you get it, discount it because it wasn't the equivalent of puppies and rainbows.

I’m sure there will be more on this topic as well much to my dismay.

 

The Pain of Teambuilding

I work in corporate America. “Teaming” or “team building” is an important part of the corporate culture. It is a subject that I find exhausting.

The people in my work group are all nice people, but we are not best friends. I don’t think we will ever be hitting the weekly happy hour. I don’t think that level of intimacy is required to function as a team. From my point of view it’s all about the common goal; the project or task that the team is working towards to further fatten the wallets of our shareholders. It’s not about lunches and outings and spending more time with people I probably see too much of already.

There are of course exceptions. I do, of course, have friends both in and outside of my current team that I “do lunch with” or share a happy hour. That is to be expected.

There are those on the team who feel like everyone needs to be best friends and has a right to know all the personal details of everyone’s life in the name of “teaming”. These folks feel that personal camaraderie is equivalent to working efficiently on a team together. Ironically these are also the most annoying people on my team. I can barely grit my teeth through an hour long meeting. Anything on a social level including hallway water cooler chit chat would be tantamount to a red hot poker through the retina and is generally best avoided.

Over the past 2 weeks our department has endured three, yes count ‘em, three, separate sessions where we “share our feelings” on a wide variety of subjects…including teaming. Sharing is exhausting and it generally produces no real outcome.

In our most recent kumbaya session our team had a mandatory visioning exercise wherein each team member looked into our crystal ball to envision how the team would “look” in the next in two years. Then we had to share with a partner, rotate partners, share some more, rotate for the third time and share again. I am not making this up! And there wasn’t even alcohol to dull the pain of this exercise. Then….wait for it….we had to share as a group and brainstorm. URGH! Stop the insanity!

One of the comments shared was we needed to do more teambuilding because and I quote “someone one aisle over was having a personal major life event and we all didn’t know about it” . Ummmm. It’s personal and therefore not required fodder for corporate consumption.

This is the kind of thinking that keeps me in SuperCash tickets each week while simultaneously counting down until retirement so I can walk away from cubicle living and never look back.