Around the Office (Part 2 of ?)

Today's topic: Two office personalities. (Perhaps among other things)

With my limited work within the place I work I would say that there are two major personality types within the workplace with regards to work delegation. The first are what I call equalists and the other are elitists.

I generically come into contact with work from about 5 different people in the office on a regular basis. We'll call everyone by their real names, just to make it interesting. The elitists I will call Person A and Person B (these are their real names...) and the equalists I will call Person 1, Person 2, and Person 3 (Again, these are their real names).

First I'll focus on the differences between the two. The equalists are the people who will give work to you because they don't have all the time in the world to complete the work they have. However, when they do give you work, they complete it as best as they can before they pass it on. The best instance of this comes with dealing with Purchase Orders. I used to have to copy the purchase orders, stamp the copies and the originals with different stamps, enter an online IM ticket system and make an entry, then send the copies to accounting and file the originals. Well, the powers that be decided that the only thing that needed to be done with those purchase orders was to staple them and file them. This turned a 10-step process into a 3-step process. The first step is the stapling, the second step is the hole-punching, and the third step is the actual filing in the filing room. The equalists will at least staple the Purchase Orders (POs) before passing them on to me. Sometimes I'll get POs that have been stapled AND hole punched. This makes my job so much easier. All I have to do is walk to the filing room and put them in the proper binder. Person 2 and Person 3 do this all the time.

The elitists are people who feel that anything not in their job description somehow feels "beneath" them and they do not want to do it. Thus they delegate it to someone else. When I get POs from the elitist, the person doesn't even bother to take the 5 seconds it would take to staple both corners of the PO before putting it in the filing inbox. She paper clips it. There is a slight chance that she has not gotten the memo that POs no longer need to be photocopied (even I didn't know it for a while) and she still is within that mentality. But I would imagine that the other two equalists who work on the POs with her would have told her. So that is what gives rise to my impression that she (I will now refer to her as Person B) is an elitist.

Now, POs aren't the only thing in which I experience elitist and equalist behavior. The Person A and Person 1 are reserved for this area since they are the highest up in the management structure (or at least as I understand it). Person A is probably the prime example of an elitist and Person 1 is a prime example of an equalist.

Person A is a nice person. They bake cakes for special occasions, willing to loan you money when you go out to lunch for a going away party and you didn't bring any cash on you, stuff like that. However, when it comes to work delegation, Person A is a huge elitist. Person A loves to hand you work, even when it completely exists outside the bounds of your job description, existing in another dimension of existence in fact. Person A likes to walk into your office and start asking you, "Are you busy?" When you start to reply, "Yeah, I have enough to do..." Person A will immediately say, "Good. Now I have a project for you..." This begins the long and arduous process of Person A attempting to explain what he has in his head. I believe that Person A does not in fact speak English when he talks about his various projects. I believe he speaks an ancient language, long believed to be extinct, that he believes you should miraculously understand when he starts going over the various terms (called "legal jargon" in modern slang) in this language. Now some of the words in this ancient language are the exact same as the words in English. Such valuable words like, "the" and "and" and "you know what I mean?" By the time he's done orating in tongues, you smile, nod, and say, "I'll get on it when I have the time."

Now, since you have understood nothing of what Person A has said to your face, you decide to wait about 15 minutes and then you send him a written e-mail asking him to explain EXACTLY what he wants you to do. A work day later for you (which for me is Monday, Wednesday, or Friday) you get the response which, much to your delight, is written in English. However, much to your dismay, you read the e-mail and it is very vague and encompasses a very large topic. So you send a response back taking into account your interpretation of what was stated within the e-mail and you explain what you believe to be what Person A is asking of you. Another work day later you get the response that says, "Yes. That's good." So, you begin your work. You do all of the steps outlined in the project and you compile all the information needed and write up anything that needs to be written and you submit it to Person A. A week later he asks to meet with you face to face.

In this meeting, Person A then starts speaking that ancient language again, but you can only imagine that he's dissecting your work since there are a lot of pen marks on your written work and he points to it frequently. He ends some of his sentences with an upward inflection in his voice, which represents a question in English. So, you have to give a response, although you're just spewing random words, hoping they make sense. Person A apparently seemed satisfied with your response and keeps going over your work. After about half an hour he finally speaks his first sentence in English to say, "I don't think you got what I wanted out of this project." He then reverts back to his ancient language and after another 15 minutes he says, "So take it, revise it, and get it back to me." You then go back to your office, put it in a drawer somewhere, and forget it ever existed. Person A seems to forget it ever existed as well, but you try to avoid Person A as much as possible just in case he magically remembers.

Now Person 1 would have a different attitude towards this whole project. First off, Person 1 would not even want me to do such a long, arduous project based on instructions given in another language. Second, she would believe that such a project was outside of my scope of responsibility, and therefore not necessary for me to do. Person 1 constantly argues with Person A on what kind of work to give me. Person A will say that I should be proofreading contracts to make sure that he worded everything correctly. Person 1 will say that I shouldn't need to and that it is their work to do, not mine. If the wording of the contract is wrong, then it is their responsibility to fix it. Person 1 is an amazing person. She gives you work, but it's always work that's either "no rush," or fully within your responsibilities. And Person 1's definition of "no rush" is basically do it when you're bored out of your mind and you're resorting to writing blogs to pass the time. But it's okay for right now 'cause I'm on break.

Perhaps you have worked with such people in your office. Elitists and Equalists may be perfectly wonderful, amazing human beings outside of work, but within work they have different personalities. Elitists want to do as little work as possible while shoving as much work as possible in your face. Equalists are just that, they believe that they should share their own burden of the work, when possible, and give you what needs to be given. So, if you're in an office and you find yourself coming into contact with an elitist, do what I do: either run into the restroom or take the scenic route to wherever you're going, a scenic route that takes you into parts of the office that you've never been to before... on a different floor... in a different building...