I had a kind of epiphany yesterday.
Sometimes, when I instruct barristers as part of my job, they will critique some aspect of my work in a very rude way (and often when they are wrong in law anyway). I also have some cliquey colleagues who are needlessly hard on the social errors of others, e.g. snapping at you for interrupting their conversation even if you didn’t realise they were talking. Instances of both happened on Friday.
What topped it off for me was the following: I overheard that my colleague, a PA, was stressing out because one of the partners had asked her for some lecture slides on committal applications. I let her know that, while I didn’t have slides, I did have a word handout from a talk I had given on it before, if that was any good. She forwarded that to the partner, explaining that it was from me. He thanked HER and then later asked me if I had “had any luck” finding an example of a committal application he could use (he had never actually asked me).
There are some points you reach where you’ve just got to laugh. A sense of humour is sometimes the only way you can keep yourself sane. It also provides that cathartic Holy Grail of being able to let go of legitimate anger without feeling like you have been left without vindication. You just have to think “pfft… whatever man” and then go to the pub.
I often hear my aforementioned colleagues complaining that they are hard done by, e.g. because they have to work over their contracted hours in order to meet billing targets or because they have to respond to a client to keep them happy at an inconvenient moment. I sympathise with both of these points… but I also see it from the management’s perspective. They are under pressure themselves to keep the clients happy. If you’re not prepared to drop everything to help solve their problem, or to work late to make sure they get their application into court the next day, the client will find a firm who will and they won’t come back. That’s the commercial reality that never really goes away. And ultimately, if you’ll excuse the management-speak cliche, you have to be your own brand – if you want promotions, if you want more responsibility, if you want bonuses, you need to think of yourself as a self-contained business, whatever your working arrangements may be on paper. My rule of thumb is that I don’t mind giving 110% for my boss or my colleagues as long as I know we are genuinely on the same side; that’s how teams achieve great results. And if you think you’re entitled to a bonus without doing extra work (which is one complaint I heard from them) then you’re barking mad.
Dare I say… perhaps they could take a leaf out of my book here. Perhaps they could learn to laugh off the things that annoy them.
The Rambling Aspy 