So often, the problem with workplaces is that the definition of success and confidence is so narrow and biased that it often blinds people to true talent and true leadership, despite the number of leadership courses out there trying to rectify the situation. All these training sessions about innovation, leadership, championing diversity, being resilient, have no application in the real world if peoples' first response to a challenge is "I do not have the power to change this". So long as people believe in their insignificance then they will never amount to their potential and power vested in them would be power wasted. The real challenge of leadership is having the guts to exercise it, no amount of lunchtime training sessions is going to do that for you.
I disagreed with a culture that mistook shallow self-promotion for confidence, and in turn favoured confidence over competence. Reluctant to use their own sense and judgment, people relied on others to tell them that they were good, and not only did they believe it, but they told everyone else with a different understanding of confidence to engage in the same sloppy PR exercise. I didn't know that being good simply amounted to telling other people that you were. What a farce. That's when I knew that no matter how much I liked the people personally, or how stimulated I was by the nature of my work, this workplace would not make me grow into the kind of leader I hoped to be. I felt the culture was rewarding the wrong behaviours and I did my best to rebuke the behaviours I found counterproductive. Nonetheless, through a system of incentives and rewards, I could feel the forces encouraging me to become exactly the kind of person I could not respect. So I knew I couldn't stay there. One thing I did learn though was what happens when good people do not act.
An unequal burden of work, a team sometimes working little better than your average university assignment group, people working hard and not being recognised, people talking very loudly and being recognised, a woman doing the same work as a man but being paid less, people taking on the burden of team responsibility being told to limit their boundaries, people being encouraged to jealously guard their own workload and not to help. Self-interest, individual well-being, prioritised over team performance every time. Compassion, care, investment in the team and its culture as an asset, was became an ill-advised attempt to control something that was outside of your control. I wished we were more than the sum of our parts but in reality we were a little less. A well-deserved penalty, when no one wants to be a team player.
There were other things. Somewhere along the line, apathy was mistaken for resilience, stasis for self-reflection and promises mattered more than delivery.
Attention to detail and organisation was seen as a menial task beneath (surprise) some of my male colleagues (in their linear way of thinking, perhaps they thought it was a lower-order cognitive task unlikely to increase chances of promotion). Yet in the same breath they lamented that the team needed someone who was more careful with their work. Well, if they wanted more care they only need to change themselves. Carefulness and carelessness is not some inborn trait. People are careful about the things they care about. They are careless when they choose not to care. What my colleagues really wanted was the ability to have someone pick up their mess for them, rather than cleaning up after themselves.
So many times I was praised for giving so much attention to detail, yet I wish they'd dispense with the compliments and just learned to look critically at themselves. You too can be careful if you want to.
At the same time, I was also being criticised for working too slowly and gently encouraged to trade-off accuracy for speed. Ironically so we could deliver a project ahead of schedule, when actually its real value was the quality we were promising to clients, who by the way were in no rush and couldn't even hurry up with the approvals we needed to progress with the project. And that's not to mention that a lot of my time actually went to fixing up someone else's messy code - someone else who thought they were trading-off accuracy for speed but who was just trading-off everyone else's time for their own convenience.
But like I said, we were not a team of team players.
Last but not least, and as I've said elsewhere on this blog, I've never had to stand-up for myself more, and shown more courage and confidence than in the last year of my job. I gave a lot of honest feedback, and to everyone's credit it was taken very well but always with the refrain that it was outside of their control or that nothing could be done about it. Often I was left to raise things directly with people several levels above me, because everyone else in between cleared out whenever their support really mattered. Being truly listened to was a pipe dream, and often I was the only active participant in these conversations. I was expected to raise concerns and speak up if I had something to say (which I often did), provide examples if needed, and then supply the solutions straight away (and be the sole contributor on that front). Those with more power and responsibility than me (and who coveted that power more than me) rendered themselves into objects with no agency, again under the refrain that they could not do anything about it.
I rose to the challenge because I valued my own volition, even though others were so quick to abandon theirs. And not only in private conversations on difficult topics (it felt like I had at least one of those every day), but I also delivered well publicly. Presenting on models that maybe I'd only built in a day or two and then presenting it to tricky, even cheeky, stakeholders who were a little too happy to undermine our project. Not being deterred by technical difficulties, I always found other ways to present what I needed to say. All this, while being told that I wasn't confident enough, that I needed to do more to signal my strengths. I know there is some truth in this feedback, but I also cannot signal my strengths to people who do not know how to recognise strength. Will people who have never been truly confident be able to recognise real confidence when they see it?
There is so much noise in the workplace - unless if your ambition is to be a diffident corporate monkey, manoeuvring it successfully demands clear judgment. People don't realise that to a highly self-aware individual, your feedback will reveal more about yourself than the person you're commenting on.
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