On cluelessness in the workplace

The biggest problems that damaged my health and destroyed my quality of life (or maybe I should just write destroyed my life) when I was working were:   manifestly excessive workload;   inflexibility regarding the range of human preferences (i.e., too many managers amathiacally assumed everyone wanted the same types and amounts of socialisation - including having holidays when it was stinking hot, crowded, noisy, and expensive);   administration systems that were incompetent and excessively & unreasonably complex;   and   TOXIC POSITIVITY. 

The latter meant a lot of comments were simplistic and downright dangerous - and the expectation over recent years that employees would set their goals solely for what the company wanted was egregiously damaging, and is manifest cause to justify actively dissuading people from getting into engineering and probably many other professions. 

I suspect that some comments may have been intended otherwise, but owing to incompetence at communication and the toxic workplace contexts, often came across as threats. 

As an example, in the 90s a small group of us did a personality/skill mapping exercise that was based on the wrong premise - that when people lacked skill/ability in one area they would have it in others. 

My map showed a deficit in all areas - probably relating to lack of confidence. 

One of the other senior participants said I “better” see someone about that - which sounded very much like “fix yourself - or else!”

As I indicated, the person concerned may have meant it otherwise, but their cluelessness meant it came out as a threat - and the person running the session was so useless they didn’t even think to acknowledge that something could be wrong ... which casts significant aspersions on the competence of whoever came up with that personality mapping system.

They all - the whole lot of ’em - needed to have read Gina Battye’s book (unfortunately only published now, not thirty years ago) - “The Authentic Organization: How to Create a Psychologically Safe Workplace” (pub. Wiley, 2024, ISBN 9781394232291; Wiley, Apple Books, Amazon).

In my case, given my recent identification as probably AuDHD, I have also wondered whether anyone suspected/thought/knew I could be neurodivergent. If they did, and said something, they stuffed that up; if they did, and said nothing, I will - jokingly - suggest that their tongues should finish atrophying and drop out ... 

Looking back now, I can see that autistic burnout was a major problem - the burnout was not the same as others who were overworked, and I never fully recovered. 

And AuDHD was probably a key part of what I had thought was lack of confidence at that mapping exercise in the 90s.

For now, Dear Reader, I suggest you consider: 

• are keeping silent when you should be speaking out? If yes you could be enabling/participating in massive harm;
  

• are you capable of communicating in way that is not tainted by toxic workplace culture? If not, can you find a way to remedy that?  
• if the answer is no to both the preceding, can you go somewhere else?
  

 

 

PS - see also   “Neurodivergent + ‘giving 100%’”   https://youtu.be/mq98JPaYIy8      

 

 

Assumptions / basis 

In writing this, I have assumed / started from the following: 

• this blog states quite clearly that it is about political and human rights matters, including lived experience of problems, and thus I will assume readers are reasonable people who have noted the content warning in the post header;

Possible flaws 

Where I can, I will try to highlight possible flaws / issues you should consider:

• there may be flawed logical arguments in the above: to find out more about such flaws and thinking generally, I recommend Brendan  Myers’ free online course “Clear and Present Thinking”; 
  
• I could be wrong - so keep your thinking caps on, and make up your own minds for yourself.
  

 

If they are of any use of interest, the activism information links from my former news posts are available in this post. 

 

If you appreciated this post, please consider promoting it - there are some links below. 

Note that, as with my main blog [see here], I am cutting back on aspects of my posts.

Remember: we need to be more human being rather than human doing, and all misgendering is an act of active transphobia/transmisia that puts trans+ lives at risk & accept that all insistence on the use of “trans” as a descriptor comes with commensurate use of “cis” as a descriptor to prevent “othering”.

Copyright © Kayleen White 2016-2024     NO AI   I do not consent to any machine learning aka Artificial Intelligence (AI), generative AI, large language model, machine learning, chatbot, or other automated analysis, generative process, or replication program to reproduce, mimic, remix, summarise, or otherwise  replicate any part of this post or other posts on this blog via any means. Typo’s may be inserrted deliberately to demonstrate this is not an AI product.     Otherwise, fair and reasonable use is accepted under Creative Commons 4.0 on an Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike basis   https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/