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This month's question:

Q:  I know you must be a very busy person, but I saw your piece, in Business First, Success in the Workplace: Don't let your workplace resemble `Survivor' and wanted to ask your advice with regard to something I experienced in the workplace today.

I'm in a temporary position (internship sort of) at a professional organization. In a nutshell, this is a politically charged organization in the throws of significant change ... not downsizing, more restructuring of the service they provide in order to survive into the future.

Here's my issue as succinctly as I can put it. I'm working a project with a person we'll call Jane, who is supervised by the same person I am (we'll call the supervisor Karl). I'm certainly subordinate to Jane since I'm only temporary and "applied" where resources are needed. Long story short, there was a bit of an delay related to my piece of the project which got the attention of the "leadership". Nothing huge, but given the politics of the organization, Karl (supervisor and overall project manager) was questioned about it by leadership, who (Karl) then went to Jane to find out what was going on. Jane readily blamed me for "miscommunicating" details of the project which resulted in the delay....a bold faced falsehood.

I feel backstabbed and deceived. The small delay of the project is not that big a deal, yet this person readily and rather quickly blamed me (by name) when a simple explanation of the facts would have sufficed.

This kind of behavior leaves me saying, "what's up with that"? I learned about this via a co-worker who forwarded an e-mail with the entire dialogue between leadership, my supervisors (Karl) and Jane. Help me out here .....

1. Why would my project leader, Jane, do this and

2. Why would the co-worker send me the e-mail trail I should never have been privy to in the first place.

Trust and credibility in Jane is blown for me. How do I deal with this kind of office politics...I'm pretty seasoned, but this type of thing never ceases to catch me by surprise and leave me feeling a bit "naive". Give me some insight if you can .... Thanks very much. 

Yours,
Political Pollyanna

A. You have described a complex and difficult situation. As to your question about why people would do the things you describe, there is no way from your brief description that I can know the "why" of their behavior. People always do things for their own reasons.

The more important question is: what should you do?

I think you have several options:

1. If things are bad enough, you can quit and find a different job. This is a viable option if things are bad enough.

2. You can stay and become bitter and resentful. Perhaps you can even get revenge someday for the wrong you feel you have experienced. This is a poor option because it doesn’t resolve the issue and it turns you into a miserable creature.

3. You can learn from the experience and use your learning to improve and do better in the future. This is probably your best option. You can’t change what has happened but you can use the experience to improve yourself and to position yourself better. Winners use adversity as an opportunity to learn and to improve. Most people use adversity as an opportunity to wallow in self-pity and to complain about their misfortune.

I suggest you sit down with the people involved, either together or individually, and talk about what you have collectively and individually learned from the experience and what you can do to prevent the same type of thing from happening in the future. What can you learn from the experience to perform better in the future both individually and as an organization?

As a personal example, at one point in my career, I received a scathing performance evaluation that I thought was unjustified and wrong. Rather than becoming resentful and seeking to get even, I used the evaluation as leverage to get the company to pay for extensive training to improve my skills.

In my Project Management Seminars, I emphasize the evaluation step as one of the most important steps in project management. By evaluating what worked and what didn’t work, you are in a position to improve with each project that you do. When organizations and individuals get in the mode of placing blame instead of learning from their mistakes, they set themselves up to repeat their mistakes.

Let me know what you decide to do and how things work out. I wish you the best.

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Terry Bragg and Peacemakers Training offers a variety of tools for promoting, maintaining, and recognizing excellence in your workplace.  We also offer tools for helping you achieve and maintain personal excellence.  To learn more about these tools, click here: Tools for Workplace and Personal Excellence

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