Wait, What Just Happened?
Imagine this, you’re at a meeting discussing product release plans. There’s a disagreement between the product manager and the marketing manager regarding these plans (both are serendipitously women). A vigorous discussion develops debating how to reconcile these issues, and suddenly you see your VP turn to one of your co-workers and laugh, commenting “great, a cat fight!”
Imagine this, you have an idea for a product support database for your company that will help your customers a lot. You convince management to support the project, line up the right stakeholders and pull together a team to develop the database. Then one day you discover that one of the stakeholders has organized his own meeting with the rest of the team, publicly claims he created the project and now leads it.
Imagine this, the CEO of an important customer finds out that your company’s next product will not have a feature they’ve been asking for. He complains to your CEO and demands that it be added. Your CEO agrees and inquires why the feature was not included in the first place. When the inquiry comes down the chain, the product manager owning the feature broadcasts that “everyone should feel ashamed for not implementing the feature until the situation was escalated to the CEO level by the customer”. He doesn’t ‘own up’ to the fact that he was the one who declared the feature ‘too risky’ to implement and had it dropped during the product planning phase.
The modern workplace can be a pretty crazy place. I witnessed, first hand, all three of these incidents in the past few years in organizations I’ve worked in, organizations within successful companies that are the industry leaders in their field. I’m sure you’ve seen similar incidents. Harassment, dishonesty and dysfunction aren’t particularly unusual in the corporate world.
But It’s Not All Bad
Yet in the same organizations where the just described bad behaviors happened, I’ve also worked with great people and great teams.
Now imagine this, your company is about to release a new product. However, at the last minute a customer wants you to test your new product on a new system they’ve just built. Your testing team is already fully subscribed and you can’t afford a schedule slip. The only option seems to be to tell the customer that you won’t support their new system. But the testing manager confers with his team, and then commits to performing the additional testing with no delay to the product release. The testing manager is challenged by management about this decision, since his fully loaded team is taking on extra work at the last minute. The testing team doesn’t waver and delivers!
Now imagine this, your company has just released a new product. The customers love it and immediately begin using it. Everyone feels a sense of pride and accomplishment. However, a week after the release of the product, a customer complains that your new product causes their business software to crash. Soon a crisis has erupted, as a number of customers are impacted. The next three days are a whirlwind of crisis management, with people cutting short their vacations and the organization pulling together across multiple continents to fix the problem, test the solution and provide ongoing progress updates to customers. It’s exhilarating to see the organization come together with a strong sense of purpose and teamwork!
So the modern workplace can be an exhilarating and rewarding place, too. I witnessed, first hand, these two incidents in the past few years in organizations I’ve worked in, organizations within successful companies that are the industry leaders in their field. I’m sure you’ve seen similar incidents. Commitment and teamwork do occur in the corporate world.
What To Do?
We all want to work in great organizations. But when was the last time your company asked for your feedback on the company, organization or senior management? They are more likely to ask you to do performance reviews of yourself or your peers, than how to make the workplace better. If they do ask you how to make the workplace better, it generally feels like they’re just going through the motions and won’t take any real actions to improve the organization.
So how do we make our workplace better? In order to reduce the bad behavior and reward the good, we need to be able to share what’s really going on inside our organizations. Since most companies aren’t tackling this problem, we are, with quiply, an app that enables people to authentically share their workplace experiences, good and bad, in a way that’s hard to ignore.
quiply is available in the App Store today.
Use: quiply in the App Store.
Follow: @quiply_me, facebook.com/quiply.me.
[Author]
MJ Lin is a co-founder at quiply Inc.
