Musings from Brian J. Noggle

Oops, I Am Revealed

So I am reading this piece in the Implement change to overcome workplace anarchy", mainly because I transposed the verbs when I read the headline, and it says:

I'd seen it before with other teams. It was another "Lord of the Flies" situation. The leadership vacuum had created a breakdown in moral behavior. Like in William Golding's famous book, "The Lord of the Flies," the group had deteriorated into anarchy, with some members resorting to cruel control tactics to assure their own dominance and survival. Newcomers were mistreated, positive acts were sneered at, rude and cruel treatment of teammates prevailed, management's directions were ignored or challenged, and customers were barely served.

The circumstances leading up to this situation, were predictable: a weak leader, or a series of many leaders over a short period of time; a hardened, cynical group of workers; a few positive employees; a band of negative employees, who filled the power void with intimidation and retaliation as their weapons; and some fence-sitters, who kept their heads down and their mouths shut.

The new leadership team had to take back control and restore order and civilized behavior. But where to start? First, we needed to get a clear picture of what we were dealing with. I lead the management team through a process to determine where each member of the team fit: positive leaders, negative leaders and fence sitters. As we stood back and took a look at the finished product, the picture emerged -- most of the employees were either fence-sitters or positive, with only a handful of negative, bitter leaders at the other end.

and I thought, "Great, a bunch of MBAs hired from outside the company with no real knowledge of the way the software works but has so damn fine book and spreadsheet theories, so they hire a hotshot consultant to troubleshoot our attitude. I hope I'm in charge of the trust fall when this nutbar goes down so I can catch him by his necktie."

The new management's probably just preparing for layoffs anyway.

So now you know what sort of co-worker I am. As I explained to El Guapo, maybe Cagey, and certainly my other co-workers, I am the worst case scenario guy. Whatever the company-wide e-mail says, you come to me and I'll augur the worst possible scenario from it. Worse than you could think of, werd.

- posted by Brian J. @ 7:10 PM