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How to adopt an “openness” mindset at work
- wwarner 7y agoThis is excellent advice.
- twiceaday 7y agoThe word 'player' doesn't fit well and has bad connotations [1]. [1] https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Player https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Player
- chucksmash 7y agoReading the article makes it very clear that they are not using the word in that sense.
- xmakl 7y agoGirls of course would never do such a thing. Unheard of.
- WrtCdEvrydy 7y agoSeducing your coworkers to your way of thinking is part of the job in my mind.
- sdrothrock 7y agoEven in just the title, I thought of this as "player" as in the context of "team player" rather than that particular slang. Edit: I've linked this to a few friends and all of them thought of the slang! Go figure. :)
- slothtrop 7y agoIt has more than one meaning. see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Player_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Player_(film)
- LandR 7y agoI wouldn't expect anyone to read "player" in the blog title and read it as the meaning in your link!
- Waterluvian 7y agoI adopted a very similar perspective after years of having a lot of manager churn. I used to get so frustrated that my job was unnecessarily difficult because of them. Now it's become, "this is an opportunity to learn new ways to communicate with a manager who thinks it's 1985." So instead of being frustrated at the statement that my TypeScript and the other team's C needs to use the same headers, I focused on how to communicate, in an economy of words, why this API deviation may be a process problem, not a technical one. And in the years since that, I've slowly gotten better (and regressed at times) focusing on what I can control.
- bamboozled 7y agoThis only works with certain type of manager. If you have a sociopath and manipulative superior with a lot of power, talking won't do much. You will have to rally others around you and demand either the board or their supervisors for change.
- louisvr 7y agoI have worked with two kinds of managers with outdated ideas or skill set: 1. The first kind is humble, respectful, friendly and likes to learn the modern stuff. These managers are nice to work with even if their skills are outdated. When you help managers like this by bringing them up to speed, you feel happy, the manager feels happy and it is a win-win situation. Relationships become stronger. 2. The second kind is egoistic and likes to assert their power. They are not in the game to learn the technology stuff but instead to advance their career further in the management ladder. I have found that interacting with these managers drains my energy and creates unnecessary stress even if I have to say the exact same thing I would have said to the first kind of managers. I don't exactly know why it creates more stress though. I guess the additional stress is due to lack of trust and lack of a good relationship with this kind of managers. It always seems like the manager is not on my side but always exclusively on their own side. And indeed the only way to get out of this situation is to rally others around myself and have the manager replaced with someone of the first kind.
- 7y ago
- elliekelly 7y agoThis seems a lot like the concept of "Locus of Control": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locus_of_control https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locus_of_control
- koboll 7y agoIf you're going to invent an arbitrary term for workplace assertiveness, maybe don't make it homonymous with a term for an aggressively flirtatious man.
- drak0n1c 7y agoIt's not an invention or arbitrary term. The more traditional usage of the word player for much of the 20th century was to mean someone with agency and control over their own life and surroundings. The usage evolved (narrowed) with the popularity of rap in the 90s.
- harlanji 7y agoIn my mind they’re the same. A player makes plays and rises in the social and economic hierarchies to the point that multiple women are courting him, thus giving rises to the guy “playing games” complaints, “being a player.” Pick-up artistry mocks what players do around women to get women (poor motivator) and get seen as “players,” kinda like crackers get called hackers. I think rappers still meant it in the histiric sense but mass sales means more simps who don’t even know a player to misuse it more with an emphasis on women and pickup artists. In our world, leadership at top companies are the players (and ads are the drug, kinda joking).
- dunstad 7y agoLeadership at top companies is disproportionately sociopathic compared to the population at large, as well. How admirable.
- draw_down 7y agoCome on
- snagglegaggle 7y agoNot sure I can agree, was fired for being assertive. EDIT: Sure, downvote because your life experience is different and the only valid one. My mother taught me to be assertive, and as a guy that has backfired spectacularly. If you're assertive as a woman you're plucky and independent. As a guy you're seen as hostile.
- 1123581321 7y agoMaybe you could share more about what happened. Almost everyone would say assertive is a positive workplace trait in both men and women, but your anecdote could contribute a useful qualification to that with some more detail.
- orf 7y agoPeople are downvoting because the statement "I was fired for being assertive" brings nothing to the discussion. Expand on it with an anecdote or some more details about your experience, it's always interesting to hear about things like that.
- ellius 7y ago"By diverse means we reach the same end" https://medium.com/@phillip_hayes/montaigne-1-by-diverse-means-we-arrive-at-the-same-end-83142f087329 https://medium.com/@phillip_hayes/montaigne-1-by-diverse-mea...
- jayd16 7y agoThe advice is not so much about being assertive as it is about being solution oriented. If your assertiveness is seen as hostility, you should not be a victim and blame society and your mother, you should instead think about what actions you can take to change the situation.
- snagglegaggle 7y agoI wasn't blaming my mother, but I was blaming society. How, or rather why, should I think about what actions I can take to change the situation if there was not some problem with society? I've been searching inwards for years now, and at some point there is nothing left I can do. I've routinely been fucked over by authority. In this case it cost me 2-3 years of my life and setbacks in school.
- dang 7y agoSince lots of comments had an adverse reaction to this use of the word "player", we replaced it above with "openness", which is the word the article uses to describe a "player". Hopefully that will help the thread focus on the article now.
- Wowfunhappy 7y agoPerhaps a better option would be: "How to avoid a 'Victim' Mindset at Work?" "Openness" totally confused me—I thought the article would be about being open to other people's viewpoints, or something like that.
- ahuth 7y agoThe article title is actually “Refusing to be the Victim”.
- dang 7y agoThat's a good suggestion, but I think the word "victim" is still likely to trigger people into reacting to that word rather than the underlying content.
- Broken_Hippo 7y agoI thought the same thing.
- viburnum 7y agoNow replace “victim” too
- viburnum 7y agoGood lord, here is a CEO micromanaging people's feelings. This is incredibly insulting and creepy. It would be more honest if he told people to just shut up and do their jobs.
- klingonopera 7y agoWhen I first read the article, I thought "Wow, this is perfect for a boss to handout to their employees and shift the blame!". Realizing now, that this was indeed written by a CEO, does add a bit of flavor, but maybe he doesn't have any employees, and it's just a motivational piece he uses for himself. To be honest, I really don't want to know.
- ahuth 7y agoWhen reading I didn’t realize it was from the CEO. For some reason, that does make it seem kind of sleazy (not sure why). On the other hand, it’s still damn good advice. It’s exactly how I would expect high-performing people to act. Victim mindset is (probably) never the right mindset.
- SkyPuncher 7y agoTo be fair, AO is an agency. This is clearly a post intended to provide guidance when working with a client. It is a bit funny to see in a public blog post from a CEO, though.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- klingonopera 7y agoThere's only so much you can do yourself, take into your own hands, look at from the other perspective, mingle around a problem until at long last you'll end up where you started again: Forces out of your control. And it's (or should be) OK to blame them, you've done your homework. But then someone comes along and says "You've been going at this the wrong way! Think positive! Think like a 'player'!". And as you roll your eyes, people label you passive-aggressive. People like that are probably a minority, but they most certainly exist, too.
- lostcolony 7y agoSo there's a difference between blame, and discussing failure. "The project was not delivered on time because requirements gathering took so long. Here's how we think we can help Product define them more efficiently in the future" is different than "It's Product's fault". Both are laying blame on Product. One is suggesting a solution and sharing ownership of it; the other is only seeking to point fingers. I would argue at no place should blame be okay. Because that creates a toxic culture; people begin to be less open and transparent about failure, are less likely to take responsibility, more likely to pre-emptively finger point to try to shift blame, etc, and it becomes political. The fact that you feel you are blameless is irrelevant if they can spin it so that it sounds like you are to blame (and trust me, speaking as a dev, the other departments are going to have way more time and experience in playing politics).
- klingonopera 7y agoI agree with you on most counts, but you're viewing it from my position of not yet having (attempted) to see it from different angles and tackling issues (i.e. yet to do homework). One should definitely do what you suggest and attempt to be constructive and productive (i.e. do the homework). But if management shoots everything down and they expect you to build a house out of match-sticks and that thing falls apart at the slightest gust of wind, are you to blame or management for not giving you better building materials? (i.e. homework done, nothing left to do) I'm advocating for a realistic view of things: Sometimes, oneself is to blame, sometimes it's something else, and sometimes it's forces out of our control, but there is always something at fault, if something goes wrong, hence there is always something to blame in failure. But seeing oneself to be blamed at all times leads to burn-out. EDIT: I'm aware you could also take a bunch of match-sticks, grind them to a pulp, and create some type of wood-like cement from it, and then build a house from that, and that might work. So let's say, they just give you five boxes with 20 matches each and it has to be at least 25 square-meters. Some might now argue, that you could go and start trading this until you end up with a house, there's the story of a guy who started trading a pen for something else on eBay, and ended up with a house. So management now insists this has to be done by the day-after-tomorrow. Etc. The question is: When and where do you stop telling yourself you haven't thought of the right solution and instead insist that management is absurd?
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- igornadj 7y agoWhile I agree fundamentally, I think the blog post is focusing too narrowly which gives me a bad taste in the mouth, and I read it as an attempt to pass blame to employees. For example, one suggestion is to point out the problem and discuss it openly. >schedule a meeting with the project stakeholders and product owners ... talk about the pattern of incomplete requirements and make recommendations ... This is great, and from my experience happens all the time. People speak up to managers all the time, every day. Rarely have I seen someone with a problem not bring it up to their manager. It's the lack of action from managers following the feedback that's often the cause for developers adopting the "victim-oriented mindset". The direct result of manager inaction is for the developer to think the issues we have are real and are not being addressed, so my manager is indirectly telling me not to bring issues up next time which causes the "victim-oriented mindset". Mindsets are situational, a developer's mindset reflects the environment they find themselves in. Poor leadership is the number one cause for burnout (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17849489 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17849489). Poor leadership causes poor mindsets.
- jayd16 7y agoThe main advice is to focus on solutions instead of throwing up your hands. That doesn't mean every attempt will be met with success. Sometimes there won't be much you can do but most of the time there is.
- TheCoelacanth 7y agoUsually, the best solution to a dysfunctional workplace is to find a job somewhere else. If managers do not act on feedback from the people they manage, that is what they are implicitly telling them to do.
- trabant00 7y agoYou can not take it on yourself to fix a company especially from a position with no authority. You will end up having negative feelings about yourself and your failures to steer the ship in the right direction. People will hate you for what they see as constant interfering with their decisions. This a recipe for ever increasing stress and eventual burnout. Please remember this: it is not your company. Not your responsibility. You didn't build it this way. Even if you could fix it - and I assure you that you can't - you would be doing the world a disservice. You would keep sociopaths who only care about short term numbers on spreadsheets in business when they rightfully deserve to fail. If you find yourself with "negative feelings like unfairness, lack of control, or frustration" especially in the IT sector please remember the job market is booming right now and give a chance to another leadership to make the world a better place.
- teekert 7y agoYou're either at the table or you're on the menu.