Perfecting skills

 

People are creative, that's just a fact. People also need tasks, to stay focused, to feel useful, to have a purpose in life, or to just have fun. Regardless of the need, business or a hobby, tasks must flow through our life.

I wrote about the importance of company culture already, so this post goes along the same lines. The purpose of a company management is to propose, plan and organize the business tasks so employees can handle and finish them in a timely manner. When the company culture is bad, the employees adopt and they adjust to best suit the environment. 

We all have a certain set of skills, we acquire them through experience. Some skills are technical, some skills are soft skills, and some are specifically designed to keep us out of harms way. When we encounter an unexpected event from the environment (like a boss being a drama queen), we come across an instinct inside us: fight or flight. If we repeatedly observe that fighting doesn't work, truth is irrelevant or insignificant in the office, the flight option looks a lot more promising. Drum roll please: 

The art of avoiding responsibility

The flight option in an work environment is perfecting a special skill. Skill of acting, to appear as one is over loaded with work, whilst actively trying to bend the rules of the job to avoid any responsibility. Some employees have it perfected to a level of art. Since they have a lot of time on their hands (while pretending they don't have a minute to spare), they analyze their coworkers and exploit any emotion to set the stage for panic and entropy. Consequently they can emphasize their contribution to the team, whilst doing absolutely nothing to solve the task at hand. The best weapon here is, you guessed it: Useless meetings, long and never ending meetings, with no conclusions, nor a plan for action at the end. The only outcome is to procrastinate and waste time, spread panic, all the while playing tag of who's to blame for the standstill (hint: it's the client). This skill takes a lot of time to perfect, because companies grow, so one has a lot of people to analyze and suck up to. As one colleague of mine would put it: "I'm 20 years in this company, you don't know our ways!" Indeed, I do not have these special skills, I have Solution Architect's skills, what a pity.

It turns out we need skills to make a salary, that is obvious, it depends on the management and culture of the company to determine which skills we will perfect. Whether it will be technical skills to grow the company, or special skills to survive the company.