Effective
Engineering
e-Newsletter
– 4/08/2010
This is your monthly e-Newsletter from
Effective
Engineering Consulting Services
(www.effectiveeng.com).
If you would like to receive Effective Engineering e-newsletters as they are
published, please send an email to
e-newsletter@effectiveeng.com,
and we will add you to our distribution list. Comments and suggestions are
welcome and encouraged!
eN-100408:
Too Much Drama!
By Tom Dennis –
President, Effective Engineering [tdennis@effectiveeng.com]
Are there times at work when you feel like you’re in a soap opera? You’re
trying to get your work done, generally with insufficient time to do it,
when all around you deep drama explodes; way too much drama!
A guy sitting near you regales anyone within earshot of his stories of
dating conquests and his trials and tribulations on the dating scene. Way
too much information and too much drama!
Another employee goes on endlessly about the personal problems in her life,
with her kids, her husband, her car, her house/apartment, her finances, her
hair, her whatever. You try to turn your ears off but to no avail. You’re
not really interested but you can’t get a word in edgewise or escape.
Again, too much drama!
A fellow employee involved in the same project as you goes into excruciating
detail about the problems he’s encountering and how he’s not getting the
support he deserves from his subordinates, his coworkers, his boss, his
group, his department, his organization, his company. Everything is all
about him and how the world is out to get him. He constantly tries to
enlist you to fight for him against all the nasty and evil forces out to get
him. You try to diplomatically let him know you’ve got your own work to do,
and to not go away mad, but to just go away, but to no avail. He wants to
make you part of his never-ending drama, kept in a continuing state of
exhausting supposed conflict that only you can help overcome. Way too much
drama!
Your group is under attack from another group in your department, or so
you’re all told by your boss, and everyone in the group needs to rally and
man the ramparts to fend off the vile attack of the evil-doers in the other
group and its heartless leader. The battle weapons are PowerPoint
presentations and Excel spreadsheets, and you’ve got to spend what seem like
endless hours perfecting the ‘weapons’ that will prove conclusively to your
boss’ bosses why the unfair attacks must be defeated and how your group is
the ‘good guys’ and the other group is the ‘bad guys’. The rhetoric is
astounding and the metaphors used are preposterous and the drama is high,
but better to ‘build’ and ‘fire’ the ‘weapons’ and defeat the ‘enemy’, even
at the expense of getting real work done that could help to do something
minor … like making money for the company and damaging your real
competitors!
Your organization is engaged in a battle for budget, and there’s a finite
pot of money available, and ‘everyone knows’ that your organization
is more critical than the others (e.g. engineering, marketing, sales,
services, finance, etc.), except, of course the other organizations. So
dramas are concocted to demonstrate that your organization deserves more
budget dollars than the other damned organizations (may they rot in hell!).
Potshots are taken and given, and people in the various organizations are
worked up into frenzies to demonstrate why they deserve more and other
organizations deserve less. Of course, the result is damaged relationships
and unwillingness to work together effectively, but what the hell, it’s an
epic drama!
Such ‘drama-infused’ employees are often under the illusion that their
personal dramas and ongoing serial soap operas are important or meaningful
to their co-workers. It is most alarming when these drama addicts are over
populated on a team and where their managers, inadvertently or not, nurture
their soap opera story lines.
Start-ups and small companies can be a great breeding ground for such
excessive drama, since there are few if any behavior-based norms or values,
there is often little effective leadership experience to head off or
minimize such drama, and there are insufficient formal (or even informal)
behavior ‘correction’ mechanisms. This is often coupled with an overly
informal atmosphere that tends to blend work and personal matters in a
dysfunctional way, so that such drama, intentionally or not, ends up being
encouraged. In the process of building the informal atmosphere, intended to
make the workplace informal and enjoyable, events are often planned that
further encourage even more drama and improper behaviors.
Larger organizations can also suffer from too much drama, but the formal
systems that are generally in place tend to significantly reduce excessive
drama episodes.
Drama can sometimes be useful to get people pumped up and engaged.
Sometimes it’s even real. It can be important to recognize when it’s real
and to develop plans to address it. People’s lives and livelihoods may be
at stake. But too much drama over prolonged periods of time is simply
unsustainable and it burns people out. In the long run there needs to be
some normalcy within work, some regular routine, some standard activities,
and some dependability. The actual work of running a business must get
accomplished efficiently and effectively if your company is to survive and
prosper.
Most companies sell products or services to people or organizations outside
of the company, and those products or services must be sold at a profit if
the company is to survive, grow and prosper. The people or organizations
buying those products or services have no interest whatsoever in the drama
that may have gone on behind the scenes to produce those products or
services. They’re only interested in whether those products or services
meet their needs and enable them to sell their products or services
profitably.
So it is best to keep in mind the real goal of your company (see also
eN-030522 – Keep Your Eyes on THE GOAL!), and avoid too much
drama!
__________
Note: I’d like to thank my friend and colleague
Mary Sullivan for her invaluable comments on this e-Newsletter, which have
been incorporated!
Copyright © 2010
Effective Engineering Consulting Services, All Rights Reserved
