Nice People and Why I Worry About Them

Today, I was in the nail salon paying a very friendly masochist to remove my old acrylic overlays and install new ones. While my fresh medium blue nail polish was drying, I chatted with a lady waiting for her toenail polish to set up. She is in HR, was laid off, took a part-time job in Finance and was brought back to her previous employer part-time. She is obviously nice and wants to do a good job. Her new employer is not ideal and a big subsidiary of an even bigger company. The person that was supposed to train her abdicated that role and dropped several very negative bombs on her right from the start. My first thought as a manager in a great big company is that we really need to be diligent about who we allow to train our employees. The next piece was some survival advice in work. Take the time to identify the necessary relationships related to your position. If those aren't right, get them fixed. Everything else is noise. If the office bully is giving you looks and being allowed to be impractical by your company it's your job to ignore that person. There is nothing there that is necessary for you to fix or really your responsibility to manage. Be polite, be professional and stay away. When we really think about it, we will not change someone's behavior unless that want to change. We may be able to require subordinates to behave at a certain level, however, in the absence of that relationship we will need to vote no on interacting with that person on more than a very basic level. There are plenty of important things to manage at work and the behavior of tertiary characters wandering the hall is not one of those things.