Petty and Small

by Scott Airitam
President, Scott Airitam's Leadership Systems, LLC

I know that for three posts in a row, I've talked about Leadership.  It's a topic that is close to my heart.  However, there are a few pet peeves out there that fight for some attention every time I get ready to write up a post.  I think I'll let one of them out now just so that it will leave me alone.  Who knew writing a blog could be so cathartic?

In the course of working with other people, regardless of title or position, we have to reconcile ourselves to certain realities and understand when the reality we think we see is really something we just made up.

The prime example of all of this that comes to my mind is one from a client firm.  This company provides a professional service and had a few hundred employees in the Dallas area.  One employee, in particular, comes to mind.  This person is a manager of a department and she offices next to her boss, the Vice President.  She consistently finds ways to produce little work herself, but regularly takes the credit for the work her employees produce.  She is not very knowledgeable in her field, but is smart enough to have people on her staff that were very knowledgeable.  That does little to earn her respect among her employees, but it does allow her to seem competent to her boss and her peers.  I bring all of this up to illustrate that she has reason to be insecure in her position and that she fights very hard to make it look like she deserves to be there.  Insecurity happens.  It doesn't have to happen, but it does.

Anyway, the manager has been caught several times listening in to her bosses conversations. You see, there is an air vent behind the door to her office and it is connected to her boss' office. So, anytime the boss closes her door for a private conversation, this manager tends to listen to the conversation.  She has been caught at this several times because she does not close her door. Instead, she stands behind her open door, just below the vent, to catch snippets of the conversation. It's like she can't help herself.  She doesn't usually get to overhear whole conversations, so she draws conclusions about what is being said or decided.  She starts rumors. The thing that gets me the most, though, is that she has been known to take action against her own employees based on what she thought she overheard her boss talking about behind closed doors.  She has taken action against employees that she has thought the boss had given praise to and she's taken action against employees she thought her VP was irritated with.  It's amazing how she could take a small piece of a conversation and make up all the rest.  It's more amazing that after making up the rest, she felt justified in acting on that made up info.

When did we become so petty and small, as a workforce, that this type of behavior can be found in almost every workplace?  I'm sure it's not ususally as blatant as standing behind an open office door to snoop, but, I'm sure most of you reading this can think of someone that is a bit like the manager I described.  (It would be interesting to hear her comments if she were to read this...she has been confronted about her behavior in the past.)  I mean, this particular woman easily became jealous of her own employees.  So jealous, in fact, that she would make life difficult for them if their hard work yielded them attention instead of her.  

Another way we've become petty and small is when we see or hear of someone getting something we didn't get.  People get so irate sometimes when they think someone else got some benefit or something extra that they didn't get.  Why do we take this so personally?  The manager in the story took it personally.  When this happens on the job, we tend to cal it favoritism.  In my job as a consultant, I can site many cases of one department in a company believing that another department didn't have to work as hard.  On the strength of the belief alone, no proof, the first department would become passive-agressive toward the other department sometimes to the point of actually sabotaging the work.

It's these types of things that slowly poison otherwise good places to work.  Leaders need to stand up and address these issues in a positive, professional way. That's exactly how I teach Leaders to deal with these situations in my course Leadership First!  More effective, though, is when the culture has been cultivated and developed to the point where Leaders do not have to step in to deal with these types of situations, peers do it first.  It might seem like your culture can't get there from here, but I promise you, it can.

For me, petty and small has no place in the measurement of the quality of work life that I lead.  I don't need that type of drama around me and I'm not afraid to address it.  It's unfortunate that many people do deal with this type of stress on the job every single day.  Because I know how interconnected things are, I also know that the stress that we download on the job often comes out at home.