Cogito ergo scribo

Oh well, so much for staying away from laptop after work. Alright, at least i managed to do that until today.

Anyway, back to the topic about work.

A few weeks back, the management from China told me that they need help with their system there and asked us to send someone over, and preferable choice was me. I had been doing my best to avoid trips to China (for the obvious reason), so i told my boss that some of the tasks there must be done by the senior consultant in my team (her designation is not "Senior Consultant" but i'm referring her as such in terms of seniority, as she was the first person we hired into my team, and she is also the oldest in age too, even older than me). I was hoping that they will send this senior consultant to China instead of me, just like what happened back in year 2009 when she went over there on behalf of me due to my personal issue.

Yet, this time the finance head of China insisted to have me over, and so their decision was to have both of us to go together. Everything was fine up until someone played some office politics and caused a hoo-ha. They had wanted to replace the senior consultant with a user from Malaysia for the trip, to which i opposed and questioned this decision. After taking my concerns into consideration, the final decision was to have all three of us to go there, and the two of them will be working together on the tasks that were originally assigned to the senior consultant.

The problem was that this has caused tremendous disgruntlement and unhappiness for the senior consultant. First of all, there was bad blood between our team and the users in Malaysia. My team members, especially this senior consultant, cannot get along with the users there at all. Secondly, she felt that the arrangement was an insult to her capability and profession. She felt that the management did not trust her work and was sending a business user to spy on her.

When she was told of the arrangement, she outright told me, "i REFUSED to work with her", and "i REFUSED to go then". And of course, these were followed with endless whining and even tantrums. For almost a week, she gave me this aloof attitude and passed remarks like "no one appreciates my work anyway". Of course, needless to say, her productivity also decreased to almost a halt.

I was actually very much taken aback by her reaction and behaviour. I've always known that she is quite a temperamental person and not that easy to get along with, but i've never expected her to let emotion take control over her until this extent. I am very concerned about the output of the work if she continued to have this negative attitude.

After my several attempts to talk sense into her, she still could not cool down and i started to feel pissed too. I was not happy with how the event turned out as well, but to me, i feel that work is work and emotion should never get in the way. No matter how mad we are at certain things or people, we must never compromise on our work ethics and quality.

Of course, the effect of the increment had somewhat added on to my short patience towards the situation too. She was the person receiving the highest increment among the entire department, and i felt that if not for anything else, she gotta at least do her best for the price the company is paying her. After all, the company pays us to get our job done to the best of our ability, and we do not get to choose who we want or do not want to work with. We can do our best to fight for it, but at the end of the day, we still gotta do it simply because that is what we are paid to do.

Anyway, i did my last round of talking to her last week and decided that i was not going to do any more pep talk. I figured that i had already said my piece and she would have to think it through herself. I was preparing myself to lose her if she still could not get hold of her emotion.

She has finally cooled down and got back to her normal self in working effectively for these two days. I hope this will last and would not be spoilt during the actual trip to China.

Even though the situation is back to normal now, i was rather troubled by this event. Besides worrying about the outcome of the work, it was also kinda like a knock on the head for me. I started to wonder: how come my subordinates would actually dare to give me such defiant attitude? How come they are not thankful or appreciative of what they have - the good pay with reasonable workload and a good boss who cares and listens to them? Have i taken my "Ms. Nice Lady" approach towards them a bit too far until they forgot that i am actually the boss and not a friend (even though i am super friendly with them)?

I will leave my long-winded thoughts about this in the next post, for it's time for bed soon.

Labels: rant, work