A Reflection

I am thinking of resigning.

I know it would be an absolute shock that a blog would contain the word “resigning” from a mere budding employee. But however you may scrutinize such a word it is still just my unfounded mood of my thought as of this week; a not so much important word that had just pass on one of my messy reflections. The thought of resigning is actually pulling me out of my sleeves trying to predict if I really belong in this highly different society of people out of my imagination to exist in a workplace. Yes, there are a few that I liked the same way as they do like me in a broad spectrum. However, these “other” sort of people I stressed is far more than like the folks I rarely imagine to pass HR's difficult application process. I understand that I am being so irrational with those words but that is exactly what I am feeling for the entire week of reflections regarding my existence at work that I am confident enough to express it to unload a part of my heavy mood.

Clashes do happen. Thus this leads to miscommunications up to the point of ignoring each other building humongous barriers – walls that separate social interaction between us inside and outside work. Things aren’t go always the way we want it to be (and so do I). That’s why it is normal that there are disagreements, clashes in our personalities, beliefs and principles that’s why there is conflict. Conflicts can be an indicator of a healthy working environment that’s why I am not saying that we must do away with it. What I am referring here is the so-called “intense conflict”. This is not the journalistic jargon of the worse situation in Lebanon of a bloody war but rather a far more related war in the minds of “planted” hatred that had result to lousy social interaction of all the people involve. It is coined as “a war without an end”. I really understand it very well as most of my books way back in college about Organizational Behavior told me lots of it.

To build a variation of explaining these “intense conflicts” in the workplace as well as giving solutions, I would like to share an excerpt of a radio broadcast from Good Radio. My ears were registered from this radio broadcast in an instant, hearing words like “mediation” and “conflicts” every now and then. I made stenographic notes to run through their words that I suppose to be of relevance to share.

[start]

Moderator: What are some of the most common types of conflict that people have to mediate in the workplace?

X: A lot of conflict in the workplace has to do in general with miscommunication. Something somebody thought they heard and didn’t check out. Rumors that are spread, that sort of thing. Often times, we’ll find that a supervisor sent an email and then the email was misinterpreted by somebody…..

Y: [Sometimes] it’s a clash of expectations, unexpressed expectations. “Well I thought you knew that…” or “Why didn’t you tell me that?” And rumors are a way that people have of filling in the blanks when they don’t know what’s going on. [They make up stuff like] “we’re going out of business or she got the advancement because of…whatever.”

Moderator: What happens next? Do people just get madder and madder or are people ignoring each other? How does it turn into a conflict?

X: One thing that happens is that people gang up. We go out and try to find colleagues who agree with where we think things are and end up bifurcating the workplace. There’s actually a phenomenon called bullying that’s occurring in workplaces – people feel picked on or outnumbered. People can just hold in their resentment or their fears until such time that they have a little explosion.

Y: It’s sort of like junior high. There’s a fight. So people start to take sides. They start gathering evidence. They begin ascribing lots and lots of motives…”because they’re cousins, because somebody paid off somebody, because, because, because…” People become labeled and stereotyped and categorized. Then pretty soon, people who should be [talking] are not talking. People who shouldn’t be talking are. The amount of information goes down and the amount of rumor goes up. People get upset. The initial cause gets lost. Certainly nobody has stopped to find out what really happened.

Moderator: What is mediation and how does it help?

X: Mediation is a voluntary confidential process. One or two mediators who are third party to the issue at hand, who are objective, fair witnesses, who are sworn to confidentiality, and who are neutral, actually facilitate communication between the folks who are involved in whatever brought them to the mediation table. It’s an opportunity for the ones who are directly involved in a conflict to be the ones who directly resolve the conflict. The mediator doesn’t tell people what to do, the mediator isn’t a judge, the mediator isn’t there to figure out who’s right or wrong. The mediator’s really there to help them have a conversation about whatever it is that’s going on. People can leave the table with a mutually satisfactory resolution to their issues.

Moderator: How can folks improve their communication at work?

X: People really need to listen to one another without judgment if they can pull that one off. We tend to take things personally, we tend to hear the other one as attacking us. Instead, it’s better if we can listen seeking to understand where they’re coming from rather than becoming defensive immediately. Because when we feel attacked, we generally either choose to defend ourselves or attack back and defending ourselves usually sounds like an attack – we blame. “If only you had listened to me, you wouldn’t be asking that question….” People generally make assumptions. “I think I know what you mean but I don’t want to show my ignorance, or whatever, so I’m not going to ask the question. SO we make an assumption over what we think you mean and we’re almost always wrong. And on the other side of that, I think most people don’t say clearly what they mean. We generally cover that up a lot of times...for good reasons we think. We don’t want to hurt somebody. We don’t want to be vulnerable. I’m not going to tell you what I really mean because I don’t want to make it worse. So instead we end up talking about things that we don’t really mean.

Y: How to say what’s so, how to speak the truth, without blame or judgment is a key.

X: The key is really in accepting that for each person, their value structure that they’ve come to is right for them. And that’s kind of a challenge in our culture for many cases for us to be willing to say, “Alright, my way of looking at this is good, and your way of looking [at it] is good for you.” And maybe we can even grow by recognizing that there’s two ways of looking at the same thing.

X(still): This isn’t rocket science – to use an old cliché. This is about honest and open communication and most folks realize that’s what’s supposed to be happening. We don’t really even understand ourselves why we don’t do that. So there’s something pretty wonderful about watching people just sort of be willing to do what they want to do in their relationships and communication and give up some of the programming that somehow or other we’ve all gotten. We need to recognize that conflict in the workplace is going to happen. This isn’t about stopping all conflict. This is about changing the way we think about it, changing the way we look at it and then being willing, and then being brave enough to change the way that we talk to each other about whatever it is we see as differences between us.

Y: I see mediation in the workplace and elsewhere as an opportunity to create a space for people to be able to say what they need to say, so that others can hear, so that they can create the kind of future together that they want.

[end of the excerpt]

For this week, I realized that I have now move a bit forward for my realization that what would really make me feel committed and work effectively is the positive culture of an organization. I don’t care about the not so high pay or any high standards of the HR services to its employees. What really matters to me is the bright and shining “professional culture” evident in my counterparts. They mustn’t be just like drunkards beside Aling Nena’s sari-sari store, not like mere uneducated lads of the streets, not like those indecent groups in a cheap karaoke bar, but as respectable individuals of society. And of course not like those “ignore I exist” and backfighter humdrum individuals inside and outside the office. I cannot anymore elaborate what sort of idealism I had created from this point but then it is of great distress to witness a certain organization plutonically far from this bright idealism. How could this had happen, I just don’t know personally but this is actually happening.

Well, I cannot say that I am such a perfect fellow finding faults to some of my counterparts because I might as well have personal faults in my performance. I cannot also say that they’re the mere reason why I am so temperamental with the condition of the team or why I exhibit such a well-reserved personality. It would be the reason that the company brought me at a package. Or maybe their respective signals doesn’t really match with mine that my horizons of people that I would be proud to call close-encounters are few. Even so, I dislike being called as reserved because naturally I’m loud as anyone would think of. I would say that with this attitude I wear most often just show my sense of being even.

I am writing this not for reform but just as a realization based on how my mind assess the situation eminent at work. I may not really take this blog entry seriously after a few weeks in time because I feared (or happy?) that I would be like one of them in the future. I am still going to stay for long because I am still valuing the good training that my company had taught me. It is also because of my extreme loads of patience continually shelled inside me. As you know, I have stood far more than a year already without seeing my family back in my province. I do stand ensconced to the ground with how hard it is to live alone without any known relatives to call when I am on hard times. It is just that I am well equipped to accept life as a challenge – as a competition to fight my life’s villains named as “hardships and trials” for even once I haven’t yet felt defeated or even won anything. It just always that I am left in the middle of the way hanging within the grounds of trying to know what really is my endpoint and what really will make me motivate to work to the extremity of my capacity.

I am not resigning right now for if I do I cannot stand to call myself as a chicken. I might stay here for good. I just don’t know.

I am just thinking about resigning.