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Now that I’m a manager I’m seeing more “things” going on in my company that I never knew about before. I see the pains they take to do things the right way by layering on bureaucratic procedure after bureaucratic procedure in an attempt to do things the right way. I see how they work to make sure everyone is treated fairly to the point where skill and talent no longer matter because they’re so afraid of being unfair that they refuse to recognize that some workers are actually *gasp* better than others. I see some of the complex issues in decision making that go on in the boardrooms and back halls and I’m starting to get a great appreciation for some of the subtleties of office politics I hadn’t been aware of before.
I am also much more aware of some of the “not quite kosher” things my company does now. I’ve found some legitimate “problems” with some of our processes and expressed that concern to my own managers. I’ve gotten a lot of head nodding and “Yes, we’ll have to look into that…” but seen little real action.
Don’t get me wrong: I think most companies probably take some liberties with the thousands of legal rules and laws established for running every aspect of a large company. I don’t think my company, or most companies, set out to break the letter of the law intentionally. Rather, the laws in question are often open to interpretation, purposely vague, or simply too complex and onerous for any one person or department in a company to fully understand or follow.
I take comfort in the fact that the “issues” I’ve discovered are relatively small. No one is getting hurt, no one is dying and very little real “harm” is being done to anyone due to these small indiscretions that my company is engaging in.
I really like my job and I really think my employer provides a good product. I promote them in my personal life whenever I can. But seeing these little blemishes on my company has slightly change my perspective. I now realize that an organization can continue to work for the greater good while sometimes making small errors along the way. All in all, these infractions are minor.
But, man, they annoy the heck out of me.
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