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Workplace Noise: A thread (for me). There was distance between my CEO and I, in that, I was entry level and there were a few posts between us in the chain of command, but I saw her almost everyday and interacted with her on some level.
I thought she exuded privilege, hubris and a sense of entitlement to us as her employees and I didn’t like that. As far as I am concerned, you’re paying me for a service, so neither of us are entitled to the other. I disliked her a lot and for a long time.
But I never focused on that. She is a brilliant woman, with an eye for business (hello, she owns a successful one), talent and she does well at diplomacy while being brutally honest. She fought for her own and really didn’t owe anyone an explanation. I wanted to be like her.
I respected her achievements and I respected her, though I never liked her personally and I also never cared to understand why she was the way she was, I was there to cut a check. As the years passed and I got promoted a few times, so professionally, I inched closer to her.
In my final years, I was separated from her by only one post. It was wen I was at this level I began seeing things differently. My opinions of her changed. As employees, we have a sense of entitlement that is both fueled by, and different from our rights as employees and people.
We don’t ever stop to think abt our employers, their motivations and the risks they take to keep businesses operational. We are really no different from customers who only care about getting their product, even if u had to grow and harvest the ingredients. Employees are selfish.
As a manager, I had to now contend with that from the same people that were my peers. I was enlightened to the struggles of both parties; hearing the demands of my team but I also seeing company accounts. Manager and I had uncomfortable conversations, cos we felt like failures...
So what was I to do. While we sought ways to improve the experience of the team, they started to treat us like the enemy (at least that’s what it felt like). I had to decide whether I wanted to be their friend or if wanted to continue to climb. I chose me. So what’s the point?
With every HR challenge, I learnt more that people will pay attention to the noise rather than filter out the signals that are useful. But I also don’t blame them, many of us are not calibrated to detect useful signals, so we detect the noise and use that to guide us.
My CEO, directors others in leadership were never monsters. They simply lead how they knew how to. So rather that being vile and hateful my entire career, I chose to learn about their motivations, realign myself and connected my efforts to those.
I would have gained nothing from complaining about lack of care for employees, or unwillingness to pay more (neither of which were true). Instead, I modeled a work environment that would’ve benefited me and my goals simply by filtering the noise and amplifying useful signals.
As we move further into uncharted territories, I want us to calibrated our minds to detect useful signals. As we become masters of this, we will be better able to Filter the noise, no matter how loud they become and how faint the useful signals are.
