Skip to main content

Alien Habitat


One afternoon she was in the office, the next day she was gone - or had been let go rather. In the few weeks that we had worked together, her disengagement from the team had become all too evident - she continued to reinforce her status of an outsider by making constant references to past projects and places of employment. This is probably just as damaging in the workplace situation as talking about past relationships is on the first date.

Over the years, I have found teams to resemble ecosystems - there is a lot of variety in terms of personality types, talent, work style and more. Yet together they define a certain type of culture - open, friendly, withdrawn, competitive, deliberate, spontaneous etc. When a new person comes on board, it works best if they have a neutral energy level almost - they are able to find the flow in their surroundings and go with it quite effortlessly. Then there are those who have the ability to tease the best out of the ecosystem. Both types are make this alien habitat they are thrown comfortable enough for them to survive (and often thrive).

And finally like her, there are those who can't seem to open their mouth without causing trouble for themselves. They (along with onlookers such as myself) are astounded by how little it takes for them to cause waves. It is like dropping a marshland creature in a desert and expecting it to make it. So it was with her - she had the right credentials, did well on the interview and came with decent references. From what we could tell, she was competent as well. The team had not spent enough time with her to understand if she was right for their habitat.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Cheese Making

I never fail to remind J that there is a time and place for everything. It is possibly the line she will remember me by when I am dead and gone given how frequently she hears it. Instead of having her breakfast she will break into a song and dance number from High School Musical well past eight on Monday morning. She will insist that I watch and applaud the performance instead of screaming at her to finish her milk and cereal. Her sense of occasion is seriously lacking but then so is mine. Consider for example, a person walks into the grocery store with the express purpose of buying detergent because they are fresh out of it and laundry is only half way done. However instead of heading straight for detergent, they wander over to the natural foods aisle and go berserk upon finding goat milk on sale for a dollar a gallon. They at once proceed to stock pile so they can turn it to huge quantities home-made feta cheese. That person would be me. It would not concern me in the least that I ha...
5 comments
Read more

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t...
111 comments
Read more

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques...
6 comments
Read more