Q. Is incompetency the new normal? Every time I turn around at work, somebody is dropping the ball, making a mistake or just being plain stupid. I am really tired of having to pay for everyone else’s mistakes.
How can I stop having my job affected by other people not doing their jobs?
A. You can stop paying for other people’s mistakes if you start to assume in the workplace that whatever can go wrong will.
Clients often come to see me in a dither because they have been assuming that everyone around them had the same sense of responsibility and work ethic that they do.
If you are trying to make yourself miserable, this is a good assumption to carry around. The truth is most people feel overwhelmed by their jobs most of the time.
In the 12-step addiction recovery programs, the first step involves admitting that your life has become unmanageable. Unfortunately, most people – whether they are addicted to anything or not – feel that their lives are unmanageable. If you are that rare human hybrid that pays attention, solves problems and walks around with a constant Plan B, you are nearly as rare as a double rainbow.
You simply cannot count on other people having this level of awareness and responsibility – and if that irks you, you’re destined to be irked all the time.
If instead you assume most people, most of the time, are dropping the ball, you will tend to be right and less upset. Let’s say you have a doctor’s appointment during your lunch hour and have to be back at 1 p.m. Do you cross your fingers and hope everything goes smoothly?
If instead you call the day before, double-check the appointment and make it clear you have limited time, then call before you leave your office to reconfirm and restate you have limited time, and when you arrive restate your schedule, then you are more likely going to be back at work on time.
The strategy I recommend is that you begin to diplomatically double-, triple- and quadruple-check any arrangement you believe you have with other people.
Be calm and neutral but firm about making sure everyone is reminded about what you need. You will do more work on the front end but extinguish the chaos, resentment and emergency scrambling you’re doing on the back end.
Also, you are slowly training people around you to be more competent because they just know you will double-, triple- and quadruple-check all arrangements.
You’ll find your workplace will once again become manageable, chaos will be a rare event, and people around you will seem more competent. Then again, you are not giving much chance for them to be incompetent.
The price you will pay for all these goodies is to give up your cherished assumption that everyone around you should already be functioning at a high level.
If you hang onto the world where people should always be competent, you will get old and frustrated. If you are willing to work with the world you are actually in, other people’s mistakes will cease to be your problem.
The last word(s)
Q. My boss is an unappreciative jerk. No matter how much I work late, pull rabbits out of hats and kill myself to bring in deals, he smirks, criticizes and pays me the same. Is there a way to save my self-respect?
A. Yes, quit trying to win his approval. Do your job and stop sacrificing yourself believing you’ll transform your boss’s personality.
