On friends III

I was just listening to this episode of HBR podcast, Three Signs of a Miserable Job: Harvard Business Online's Paul Michelman talks with Patrick Lencioni, author of the new book The Three Signs of a Miserable Job. , it is a nice podcast, sometimes comes in handy and it suddenly strikes me! This could be a good back up for my argument on how work relationship will change during the next years. This could be one of the most significant reasons why people continue to behave in such an unproductive manner at the workplace. The idea goes like this: managers are afraid of going into personal issues with their employees, in part, due to the fact that their frame is set from the beginning [with the interview for example] of not getting personal, not asking personal questions, and restrict only to the professional issues of the job. Therefore, employees start to feel like they are being neglected, unappreciated and so on.

Now back to Romania. As I cannot speak about other countries and cultures, I have worked only here, with Romanians, I will develop on what I saw here. In my opinion, the above-mentioned reason does not apply to the Romanians in the same manner. I think that there lies another trigger, that has a way larger influence on the behavior witnessed here, in Romania, and that is, starting from the nineties, [but not necessarily restricted to that period] the way we envisioned our environment was biased. Perhaps the roots can be traced during the communist era, but the fact is, that after we all [ok, not all] agreed that we have won the freedom to become what we wanted, and stop being puppets, we also felt lost. We had the impression that we altogether benefited a fresh start, that we were paired in starting conditions. That was wrong, completely wrong. Nowadays things are uneven, back then, the inequity was even more widespread. I still have friends that tend to compare each other, and blame the other for not doing enough to succeed, as they did. But we were not the same!

Why does it matter? It matters, because as we felt we had the same opportunities, we also witnessed that some of us had a greater success than ourselves. And from that spawn a war of all against all like mindset, that prevented us from being supportive with the others. We all heard stories about how this person or that person walked on bodies to find financial success. So we are on our own. Therefore, what’s the use in being interested on what the others think or feel? None!

But this is so wrooooong! People did not enjoy success because they hurt others; they are not so well off now because they have skeletons in their closet. We were so bombarded with this type of idiosyncrasies that we eventually started to believe in it.

Not everybody aims at hurting us. His or hers success is not based on our misfortune/misery. It could not happen. When people will start to realize that caring for the others does not translate in losing something precious to themselves, and then they will be closer to develop a friendlier environment at their workplace.

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