Getting Personal
There's something that's comforting about having a good personal relationship with the people you work with. It makes work not seem like work, but more like a collection of friends working on a goal like helping a friend move, or painting a house. Not that it'll ever be fun, but it'll be a lot more fun when you're doing it with those you like.
I've written and talked about this fact for years now, and it's as true today as ever. However, there's an interesting wrinkle that I hadn't really considered but is just as impacting.
I'm sure that there's a Dilbert on the PHB, or some manager thinking themselves your best buddy and want to share your life with you. That's obnoxious.
Given the cuts we've had, and the state of the business, it's important to stay employed, but it's exceptionally distasteful to have to pretend to want to share with a guy that just whacked 2/3rds of the group. I don't like this guy, and I don't really feel like talking to him about my
weekend, what I did, where I went, but as soon as I say "I'm not really comfortable discussing this right now." I'll be labeled by this clown as a troublemaker and certainly not a 'Team Player'.
So it's all about games... play this game with management to allow them to think that you're their buddy, that you want to listen to their horrible little stories, and then get out of the room and shake it off. It's really amazing how we try to do our best at compromising between what we really want - nice job versus good home-life... lack of politics versus working for a tyrant. Lots of little things that we have to balance.
This is just particularly distasteful now given the cuts are still bleeding, as it were. After the first of the year we'll at least be done with the 'Good Byes', and what we have left is what we have for the year. I sure hope things pick up and I'm not expected to 'share' too much too often.