Skip to main content

Seeing Beyond

My friend M has interesting stories about her workplace which serves as a microcosm for the world of workplaces since M works in sourcing and gets to see the flow of people and technology in and out of her company. Some bring passing disruption, others lasting change for good or bad. She has been at the job for over a decade and will likely outstay the team of recent hires that she is on these days. M's team has a male manager, four women including herself and another guy - not a typical configuration for teams in her company. It would be a welcome and refreshing change at first blush but apparently it’s not. 

A lot of ink has been spilled on women being objectified, harassed and worse in the workplace, not enough is said about the kinds of behaviors that women can exhibit almost reflexively  that serves to undermine the very causes they want to fight for. Based on M's description her team is rather full of toxic females demonstrating a spectrum of unprofessional behavior that is ignored in the name of inclusion and it brings out the worst even in the non-toxic ones. 

It is part of the reason the bar is at the floor for their manager - B. His only qualification is that he is harmless. That said he does deserve extra credit for dealing even-handedly with these women despite them acting out against each other and against their best interest. That is all anyone can ask from around there it seems. The environment created by these women is such that it breeds and supports the kind of manager they have been blessed with. 

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

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

Changing Pace

This blog has been a big part of my life for the last five years. Besides giving me the opportunity to connect with a number of interesting people and share my thoughts and ideas with them, it has been a form of daily meditation for me. No matter what the day threw my way, I made a very deliberate effort to find a little quiet time to write.The process of thinking about what to write and then the act of writing itself worked as an antidote to aggravations big and small. Five and half years ago, when I started Heartcrossings both my personal and professional lives left a lot to be desired for. The only real happiness I had was in being J's mother. While that was often enough to make me forget what I did not have, I sorely needed a third place to call my own and shape in the likeness of my dreams. This blog has been where there were no limits or constraints and that was absolutely exhilarating - it is the reason I have been able to nurture it for as long and as much as I have. A lot ...
25 comments
Read more