I realize I’ve spent over a year in an organization where things kept falling apart because, ultimately, people in the organization just plain didn’t like me.
It started, perhaps, when I brought up that HR’s onboarding process made me uncomfortable because it involved a third-party sending out a third-party email to go to a third-party website to entire our personal information. Since this was a training by the larger corporate IT department, and we had just finished talking about the dangers of phishing, I thought it was a good time to mention it.
Mistake.
The next week I was visited by someone who took issue with, “not what I said, but the way I said it”. Lesson: don’t embarass HR in company-wide trainings.
Anyway, after a few similar call outs by me, I was labelled a trouble-maker, sidelined, ignored, and mistreated. This is an organization, I note, that assiduously avoids contradicting or discomfiting superiors in ANY way. That is deffos not my style.
Anyway, my question really isn’t about my toxic workplace, but what you learned about YOURSELF by working in a place that didn’t like you.
I’ll give you two more stories:
1
When I just graduated from school, I started working with a team model. I was paired with someone with fewer certifications, and I was to lead us boldly on our mission. The person I was assigned was a very beaten-down older, brown woman in a field dominated by young white women (seemingly universally with long, straight hair). She seemed to be universally disliked and disrespected by everyone. Because I was incompetent both at my job and my Spanish (sabo kid in denial), this woman essentially did my job and HERS and still got treated like absolute shit.
She invited me to an event that had nothing to do with work, an event for an organization she volunteered for where she was on the board. People treated her with respect and, in return, she was bright and bubbly. I saw a completely different side of her that night.
Lesson: Where we are beaten down, we get small. Where we are supported, we flourish.
(Kind of an aside, she was from a small country, and when I told her I was visiting, she INSISTED I go see one of her family members; he turned out to be an extremely well placed person in the government; she wasn’t royalty, exactly, but she had a social prestige in her country that was unsustainable as a middle-aged brown woman with an accent in the USA.)
2
I was working retail at one store. I’d been there for maybe two years. I always lived in fear of being fired, and when I made mistakes that I worried about getting me fired, nothing happened. I learned that, ultimately, what mattered is if people liked you, and, there, people liked me.
I eventually had to leave because of some restructuring but the manager found me the EXACT SAME POSITION at a nearby store. After a few weeks, I noticed people did NOT like me. Conversations were kept short, nobody ever volunteered to talk to me,. I got along with exactly one cashier, who was an awesome dude. It wasn’t a horrible experience, I was allowed to do my job and I did, but there was always an empty, hollow feeling.
Then the original store invited me back and it was like night and day. “Oh, so this is how people act when they like you.” I’d almost forgotten. I loved going into to work to see my work buddies and I loved shooting the shit with them during downtime.
To some people the idea that others might die wasn’t as important as them being perceived as being in charge.
I had a very slow decline over a couple years. Basically a senior VP got a married male coworker drunk at lunch and then they “stopped by VP’s condo real quick” where my coworker was SA’d.
The coworker tells everyone, HR gets involved, coworker gets a huge promotion reporting directly to the VP, and suddenly coworker “think it may have happened differently” when I asked him what in the gd fuck he was doing.
Over 2 years my team of 8 + director bailed. I stayed thinking I’d outlast the shitty leadership and be a shoe-in for the vacant director position. Instead I got put on another team where I trained a handful of actually nice people on how to work with a data warehouse but leadership was still soured on me. What broke me finally was when my new director gave a promotion related to the job I’d been teaching everyone to another person. Also after hours one day while I was teaching a different coworker how to code and my new director came by to ask if it was done. I told him it wasn’t but it would be as I was letting this person take the reigns while I watched. My director told me “just quit bitching and get this shit done.”
At our standup the next morning I resigned in front of him and the entire team. The calls I got for MONTHS after that still help me fall asleep some nights. I’m talking about being asked to debug entire log files and providing admin credentials for the database that I “couldn’t remember exactly” but they were “stored somewhere on [a cluster of 16 different servers”.
So I took a lateral move to another agency where I had the same pay but since then have more doubled my salary and been promoted 3 times in 7 years.
What I learned was actually from something my douchebag director told me: “you can’t make people act how you want to” which was a dig at me but I’ve thought about it a lot. If you’re in a toxic place where someone like my old VP has the ear of leadership and turns them against you, just bail. I knew my time was coming when I’d turn the corner on a city block and see my building and I’d feel my heart race. It’s always good to fight the food fight and we all need to but you’ve also gotta realize when it’s best to walk away and do what’s solely best for you, not some higher broader morale principle.
It also taught me a lot about workplace politics. I shouldn’t have been so open about about my displeasure and the betrayal of the coworker getting everyone involved and then doing a 180 when he got a promotion to be quiet. I’ve learned to keep the smile on my face and be more covert; otherwise the people you don’t like see it coming.
A funny part is that within a couple years of me resigning my old agency fired all the top brass - president, CIO, top VP and the VP who SA’d the coworker and that coworker also resigned. I think something blew up or happened again and it wiped that place out. It’s also seen a 70% turnover in the time I’ve been gone with 50% of that being within a few years of me leaving. It’s also never quite recovered and they’ve had to bring in “moral experts” because people breakdown and are seeing crying in the hallways.
So your key mistake was in not supporting your co-workers decision to trade in their sexual abuse for career advancement?
What a shit show.
I have to agree with you on bailing. There really is nothing to be done once the narrative against you is set.
I was too much of a straight shooter. Every new project my boss gave me, id explain all the pros and cons. And they’d just stare at me and go, “Okay so are you going to complete it?”
I didn’t realize how toxic and annoying it was until years later, when I met a guy who did the same thing when I was manager.
There are layers to being liked:
- Are you nice and pleasant around people? Always do this.
- Are you agreeable and easy to work with? It really depends on you and the job, but here you have to be smart.
- Do people respect you? You have to be honest and good at what you do, while keeping a careful balance of the second point.
Balance is hard and sometimes you may just find out that the issue might be that workplace do not deserve you and you need to move on.
Thanks for this, I wasn’t sure how to phrase this as well as you did.
Work is always a compromise between you and your needs, coworkers and their needs and management. If you know how to navigate that it goes well, or well enough till you find something better.
I learned that being autistic and working for large employers does work well at all. Although I have only worked for one big company but they probably all suck anyways.
My first ever job was at Walmart, which was an absolutely miserable experience. I didn’t last long there cause no one liked me and the managers hated my guts for no reason. I was always on time, did my work, and never complained but I was consistently treated like I was lazy and a troublemaker. I remember getting yelled at by management and having absolutely zero idea what I even did that was wrong.
All my other jobs have been at small businesses and they have always been infinitely nicer and kinder than Walmart ever was. Small businesses are much quieter and they feel more human cause they don’t have many employees. I think they did realize that I’m a little bit off (didn’t tell them I’m autistic) but they were cool with it cause I did my work, just like I did at Walmart, but Walmart just fucking hates me for no good reason.
I haven’t been the disliked person (surely not universally liked but widely liked so far) but I have sort of disliked a couple of reasonably competent coworkers - so not disliked because they sucked or dragged us down - just personality clash - and I have learned to ignore it because it’s not predictive of how well their work will get done.
Our IT department would listen to any ideas BTW, it’s getting more corporate (I joined when it was a start up but it’s been a dozen years) but not to the point of being heirarchish yet. I am sort of outspoken too and have found the wild west chaos of a startup to be my best fit, may have time to do it once more before retirement if this place gets too beaurocratic.
Never give ideas or suggest them. If they are good your immediate boss either steals the idea or fires you and suggests the idea to management.
I’m very disliked - I’m not afraid to call BS out, speak my mind, I’m not false around senior management and treat everybody equally. I put my foot down with wrong doings, particularly those affecting employments rights (where others put their head in the sand)
I don’t do socials, I’m probably overly keen and grab work at any opportunity which makes others look bad. I’ve made suggestions that have improved the way we work, which others have taken credit for.
What have I learned?
It’s just a job. The only thing I have in common with most people is we work in the same place. I’ve learned not to care.
Do others see it the same way?
No offence, but I’ve heard this a lot over the years and every time (in my experience) the person was really over their head and wasn’t contributing as much as they thought they did.
You might have few good impacts, but the overall negativity causes a lot of other, more severe problems.
But as you said, it’s just a job. But if you make it tough on everyone else? Then you’re making it a painful job for everyone else.
I get that, some of this is what others have told me (in a positive way) and it’s actually gained respect.
But where it really matters, I’m seen as more of a problem in jobs (despite outputting more than a lot of people and having a lot of feedback/input)
I find in jobs that I get a lot of praise and respect from immediate colleagues, which is generally how I progress so quick (plus putting in the effort) but I can tell higher up I’m seen as more of a problem
I guess you’ve also accepted that:
a) you’ll never be promoted and b) you’re liable to get fired
?
A) There is no further progression in my role.
B) Everybody is a number. There’s employment laws and trade unions for a reason.
There’s employment laws and trade unions for a reason.
Ah. Non-US lemster detected.
Carry on.
Thanks for sharing your experience.
I just recently had this happen and have started looking for new jobs as a result. Our company fired someone and a VP sent an all staff email and was publicly telling everyone that the now fired employee couldn’t be trusted etc. Rather than responding to the email so everyone could see, I sent a private text that information like that didn’t need to go to everyone and if someone needs to know that the individual was fired, it should be explained that “They were no longer able to uphold company standards.” And leave it at that, because anything more opens you up to a libel lawsuit. The VP’s apparently didn’t like that I was trying to protect the company, and hold to HR’s standards. So now I’m looking and realized I should have started looking 4 years ago because I can get a 40-50% raise by jumping ship.
My time at this company is coming to an end.
Some have been useful things about being more incisive, direct, clear, plainspoken.
Others have just been that people are competitive and look for any advantage to get “ahead” and curry favor with the boss, even when there’s no competition, no prize, no winner, no advantage. They just feel that by “beating” someone they “win” somehow - or might in the future.
In the latter case i console myself that a complement from one of my coworkers means almost nothing in the grand scheme of things and the promotions at my job hardly make a difference in pay but mean starting an hour earlier.
I was given a role for project coordination for a project under construction. Being on the design side, my presence wasn’t usually welcome because it meant that they got a problem that required a quick turn around and would be harder to solve than if the problem was found out during design. Anyone in that role would be disliked. Things I learned to do included:
-
Don’t document internal misunderstandings unless it went to the Contractor. It is better to keep communication open before documenting the final result.
-
If someone said they couldn’t do something, ask them why and address that problem rather than arguing with them. This usually meant talking to another project manager and coming up with another way to solve the issue.
-
Give deadlines that accounted for the QC process and had some float before it became an emergency.
-
If I had to argue, never use the word “I”. Have the book or document be the thing to argue against.
-
Never assign blame while the problem was being addressed.
-
Always start all email with “Ladies and Gentlemen of the jury”.
-
I’ve had a pretty easy time getting along with people for most of my adult life, and I’ve learned to not take coworkers who are in a bad mood or always rude too seriously, so I can’t say I’ve had the experience of being actively disliked.
But I’ve always seen people as friends pretty fast and I’ve realized that a lot of my coworkers don’t see me the same way, which has made me realize that if I didn’t work in the same place of them, most of them would probably forget me pretty fast. I don’t really have a lot of friends who live nearby outside of work so it’s always kind of stung that my coworkers who I get along with great at work don’t really want to keep in touch at all outside of work. So I guess what I’ve learned is that I should expect that the people I like, respect, and even admire at work probably don’t see me the same way and that I shouldn’t expect friendships from coworkers.
my coworkers who I get along with great at work don’t really want to keep in touch at all outside of work
This could be a time-of-life kind of thing. Before I had kids, I had all kinds of time for socialising, once I had kids pretty much all my spare time was for my wife and daughters. If your coworkers have kids, they’re prioritising their family time above other things.
Uf, I feel that. My last post here was exactly about how it seems “friendship” is just another form of casual entertainment for most people. “Do I watch Netflix tonight or get together with schipelblorp”.
I don’t think it has that much to do with work–though the forced contact might give you a false sense of familiarity–there is a deep level of cultural rot.
I was going back-and-forth with someone about if we were friends or not at work. I would always be there to empathize with her about a bad work day and would ask her about her personal life; she sometimes did the same.
We had an explicit conversation about it–we ageed we were friends. Then she just kind of ignored me until it was convenient for her, and yesterday she totally threw me under the bus, so we’re not any kind of friends after all.
But I’d like to think seeing someone every day does give you the OPPORTUNITY to make a real friend, but I think most people just aren’t capable of it. Unless they can have sex with you or you are the biological result of them having sex with someone else, you’re just a streaming service they cancel when the cost goes up.
That I brought it on myself. I discovered I was a bit anti-social and relished the quiet times without people yakking at me.
I don’t think a normal amount of introversion should be enough to make you actively disliked by your organization.
I recently saw a stand up comic talk about her autism in the workplace.
Boss: You’re not very social. Comic: What do you mean? Boss: Well, for instance, today, I said hi and you didn’t engage with me. Comic: Today is Thursday. I said hi to you on Monday, after I hadn’t seen you all weekend. And I think I said hi to you on Tuesday. But today is Thursday and I just saw you all day yesterday for the third day in a row and all you did was go home, eat dinner, and go to sleep, wake up shower and come here again. What do we have to talk about?
True enough. Though, even at lunch time, everyone broke bread together and I was across the street in a park eating a sandwich and reading a book. So, even the social times at work were avoided. When this happens you eventually get “Who does he think he is? He thinks he’s better than us” thoughts.
Turns out being autistic in a society designed against autistic people made me apparently the bad person because I wasn’t “normal”. Like I have a fucking choice.
Did you ever find a workplace that works for/with you?
I’m considering autism a little more than I used to for myself, but my problem is that I know what people are feeling most of the time, it’s just that I don’t particularly care. Like, I feel like you’re at work and you should be professional and competent and accept feedback when its given.
I was just on a job interview where I didn’t realize that the person I would be working who was in the interview with was ADAMANTLY AGAINST the position I was applying for. When I turned to her in the interviw and asked her directly, “So how is this arrangement going to work?” because it seems very amorphous and undefined, she just shot daggers at me until SOMEONE ELSE answered. She stonewalled the entire interview.
Maybe a savvier person would have picked up on the hositility and gone out of their way to butter her up, but it was just a little bit outside my thinking that someone would be so incompetent as to not be able to even be willing to entertain the question.
Never got called back for a second interview, and I’m pretty sure she picked a candidate that was much less curious about the arrangement.
I’ve learned how to enjoy it, when I am disliked by the scum of the earth, I fucking love it.
That’s how I used to feel about reddit. Like, if I’m getting a ton of downvotes, I must be doing something right, because society is a horrible place because people think in all kinds of wrong ways.
One of the foundational realizations in the last few years came from listening to the podcast If Books Could Kill, which skewers bad books that peddle nonsense philosophy, politics, and self-help. The thing that is almost universl about ALL the books they cover is how MASSIVELY popular they are. Society is absolutely addicted to delusional thinking. It’s really lead me to becoming, as one lemster put it, “a self-obsessed butthurt doomer”. Now when I get downvoted (usually without any replies other than personal insults), I know I might possibly be on the right track.
That said, there is a huge difference between the hivemind of the internet and a workplace with flesh-and-blood people I interact with everyday. I try to take the compensatory thrill of “being right” out of those interactions as much as possible, because those people in real life are my opportunity to connect to humanity as best as my little autistic soul (internet-diagnosed) can manage.
