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lydyFor years, I have hated the managerial exhortation to "work as a team." In my experience, this management attempting to not do its job. Rather than paying attention to who does what, encourage good behavior and discourage bad behavior, and generally, you know, manage, it is used like collective punishment. No need to sort out who is actually doing what, just hold everyone responsible. I hate getting the memo that I know is targeted at a specific person, which exhorts everyone to do or not do a specific thing that only one person is doing or not doing. Even more infuriating is the one-on-one, where the manager needs to scold a particular person, so he takes each person, in turn, and scolds them, regardless of who is actually fucking up and who is not. The people who work hard and care about their job get really stressed out by these meetings and the jack-off feels comfortable and camouflaged, since these meetings are always prefaced by the words, "I'm talking to everyone about this." Demotherfuckingmotivational, dammit. Most work environments do not have direct rewards for teamwork, only individual incentives. The one work place where there were specific team bonuses, there were also individual bonuses which were a) secret and b) significantly more than the team bonus.
Today, it occurred to me that exhortations for more team work are heard differently by men and women. Women are generally socialized to be team players, and are also usually the ones in the team who do the invisible team portion of the work. They organize the cupboard, wash the coffee cups, keep track of the birthdays, do things to make the physical environment more pleasant, work that is often not noticed. So when some dumb fuck of manager starts blathering on about how we all need to be better team players, and we need to pitch in and work better as a team, what he's really saying is that the girls should do more work. The exhortation is almost never specific, no guidelines as to what anybody should do. So guys stand around with their thumbs up their asses, and think that maybe they should, you know, work an extra fifteen minutes now and again, or not take a coffee break. And the women haul the team up the mountain on their goddamn backs.
Dear everybody: I'm tired. And ranty.
Today, it occurred to me that exhortations for more team work are heard differently by men and women. Women are generally socialized to be team players, and are also usually the ones in the team who do the invisible team portion of the work. They organize the cupboard, wash the coffee cups, keep track of the birthdays, do things to make the physical environment more pleasant, work that is often not noticed. So when some dumb fuck of manager starts blathering on about how we all need to be better team players, and we need to pitch in and work better as a team, what he's really saying is that the girls should do more work. The exhortation is almost never specific, no guidelines as to what anybody should do. So guys stand around with their thumbs up their asses, and think that maybe they should, you know, work an extra fifteen minutes now and again, or not take a coffee break. And the women haul the team up the mountain on their goddamn backs.
Dear everybody: I'm tired. And ranty.
no subject
Date: 2018-04-21 03:48 pm (UTC)If you're the person who's been doing it, it's mortifyingly embarrassing. And they're too chicken to call you in and say "please don't do that."
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Date: 2018-04-22 02:57 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-04-22 08:26 am (UTC)Managing may also require chipping in and doing some of the team's work, occasionally. (IME experience there's a gender difference there too, but that's another post.) Do you think that the other team members would wash a cup if they saw the manager doing it? (Ha! Rhetorical question, that one.)
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Date: 2018-04-21 07:24 pm (UTC)This particular "boy experience" may not intersect/reinforce the "girl experience," but I can imagine ways it might. So, FWIW…
I have hated being told to be a "team player" ever since I was old enough to figure out that it did not mean equals, it was a sports and military metaphor. We were not meant to be a team of peers working together for our agreed-upon good but a team of horses, pulling under the direction of the wagon master.
It denied me any measure of reasonable autonomy and it diminished me personally as well as anything I might be doing of my own volition to make the group work better; the credit went to the wagon master.
I've never much liked "team" sports, and I like the military model even less.
- pax \ Ctein
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no subject
Date: 2018-04-22 03:04 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-04-22 07:09 am (UTC)Sometimes I surprise myself[g].
I've got more clarity on where my brain was going with this. You've written previously about how, for societal sexist reasons, men don't recognize the ways that women make life easy for them. I'm not sure I can say it's taken for granted, because that implies that it's even noticed.
The situation you're describing here adds an institutional level of invisibility (as well as obligation) — no one's going to notice that one horse is doing an especially good job of holding the pace… and wouldn't give them the credit for it if they did.
Happy happy, joy joy.
pax / Ctein
no subject
Date: 2018-04-22 05:20 am (UTC)The woman who writes the column is 100% with you on this. She tells people that if there's an employee who's causing a problem, they should talk to THAT EMPLOYEE, not act like it's some sort of general thing, and that cowardly, lazy management is a Bad Thing and people should knock it off.