Saturday, November 11, 2006

Roles & Responsibilities

Lately I've been thinking about roles & responsibilites in the office: how they are officially defined, the reality of who does what and further how this affects employees rewards and incentives.

I've noticed that in every office I've worked in there are at least a couple of people who get to do whatever they want, no matter what their job title. I watch and study them, and their trick, it seems to me, is two-fold:
1. They actively persue and insert themselves into the areas in which they wish to be involved. These areas tend to (totally coincidently!) be the areas that provide the most exposure to higher ups. They get themselves invited to meetings, they inject their options and just act as if they are in charge of whatever is issue of the day. Eventually, this person's behavior becomes part of the culture and others just assume this is the correct person to be involved.

2. They pretend that things they are uninterested in persueing are outside of their responsibility, even if they clearly are part of their job. If such a task comes up in a meeting, they will sit, mute, waiting for someone else to volunteer to take on the work and if that doesn't happen, they will go so far as to suggest someone to fullfill the responsibility. If that person balks, they will be chided with some sort of "not being a team player" speech (usually: there's no I in team, you know).

This is how at my last job, I, a business analyst, was managing developers: making sure they got their code done, got in checked in on time, even helping them unit test it, while the "Development Manager", who was at the same level as me went off to "Strategic Sessions" to determine which project from a business perspective should be planned for the following year. Who do you think was rewarded during the next review cycle? Him, of course. See, he got all this visibility upwards AND appeared to be managing his group effectively. Meanwhile, I was doing half his job, while my own suffered... all for the "team" (there appears to be no big raise in team, by the way). Although the "team" did succeed in this case, the rewards didn't go to the team player in this case, they went to the person who put their individual accomplishment first.

What does this tell us about American business? That it's important to toot your own horn? That individual accomplishment secretly is more important than team? That men know better how to play the game? All of the above?

What was the correct way for me to act in that situation? There is no good way out. A reputation as not a team player isn't what one wants to have. Is the path to success to appear to be a team player, but secretly working towards your individual accomplishment only? Sadly, this does seem to be the case. I'm not sure how I could have made this situation better, except to make clear the way that I stepped up when the company needed me, to not let it appear that I hadn't taken on additional work, to toot my own horn, so to speak.
Tags:work

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