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.
That it doesn’t matter how good you are at your job, if someone above you doesn’t like you they’ll fuck you over sooner or later.
So, now I play politics and use gentle language to handle fragile men.
Yeah, fragile men. My boss is a middle-aged man, and his pretty young female assistant director is essentially his emotional support animal. Even though I don’t know how he justifies being in the office all day because he should, by all rights, not have that much to do, he still meets with her every day for about an hour–sometimes multiple times a day.
Unfortunately, that seems to the norm in this organization; men run the show, and women are there in supporting roles.
I know it’s a little off topic, but there’s a lot of great work on how women are co-opted by the white patriarchy to serve the white patriarchy. That’s kind of the deal being offered to women–they are given access to power, but only so long as they serve the patriarchy; this is just as true in fields dominated by women (teaching, social work).
Here’s the ur-text on the subject: https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/educ_llss_etds/124/
Preaching to the choir there, lol
My current boss is a woman, and in the two years since she got the job I’ve had more advancement and opportunities than in the previous 10 years
I don’t think I have a gender preference for who I work with or for, but I think I have a slight tendency to like women better. Men a lot of time fall into “respect/deference” traps and are obsessed with their authority, whereas women tend to be more collaborative.
Oh yeah, don’t get me wrong I don’t have a blind trust in working with women - the most artful and cruel backstabbing I ever got in work was from a woman.
But, I find that it’s easy to work with a smaller proportion of men. And since I’m in a male-dominated field, that’s mostly what I know.
Knew that before but it reinforces that: unions matter, you owe your company nothing
Which union are you talking about? There isn’t a single union in my entire industry as far as I know.
There always is a workers union. Just because your workplace hasnt fully unionized doesnt mean YOU cant join one
I mean, that sounds fine, I guess, but what’s the point of joining a union when you’re the only person in the union at your job, other than to paint a target on your back?
That’s not how unions work. You as one person don’t join a union. You unionize your workplace. Is it hard? Yes. But whining is pointless.
I’ve learned that working very closely with someone, night after night, does not mean that they can be trusted. I’m not talking about money. The sobering realization that everyone knew about the rumor, and no one said anything. No one had my back. And I think Team Lead was the originator.
What do you expect? You work in a factory
Thanks supervisor
You may see the same cast of characters, day in and out, but you don’t know the actors. It’s best to work with that in mind.
That said, a coworker invited me over to dinner just the other day. So that rule is obviously not an absolute. Since the rumor, though, this is how I approach things.
You may see the same cast of characters, but you don’t know the actors.
Damn. Nice metaphor with some profound implications for life…
That line from that Bob Seger song has been bouncing around in my head a bit these days. “Surrounded by strangers I thought were my friends.” The past few weeks its like the scales have been lifted from my eyes and I can see exactly how bad things have gotten at work, but also just given up on ever expecting some personal “friends” to ever be real friends and I’ve cut them loose.
im super curious to hear the story if you feel comfortable telling it
I have never been the center of dislike at the company i have worked for. I have been disliked by singular people, and it has hurt personally, but not affected me professionally.
I have however worked for 2 companies where i disliked the majority of my co workers. I have found that how much i look back at the time i have spent working, my enjoyment at the places i have worked is more about how much i liked my co workers and less to do with the work itself. Even in places where the work was hard and long hours, if they were with people i enjoyed, i still look back fondly.
Yeah, I had a horrible job with a horrible manager. I’d close the store at 9:00, leave by 9:30, be home by ten at night. Then this motherfucker would come in at 5 in the morning and fucking text me pictures on my day off about anything he didn’t like about closing. And he expected a reply from me because he paid me an extra 95 cents to be “management.”
Anyway, as stressful and horrible as that job was, I absolutely loved the people I worked with and, yeah, I, like you, remember it fondly.
So what I learned from my experiences are:
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I don’t really fit in in an organization of ass inveterate, invertebrate kissers.
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Sometimes people don’t like me and there’s not much I can do about it.
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If I’m in a place where people don’t like me AND I’m not respected, I’m probably going to be acting “irrationally” eventually (I call this the Palestinian Problem), because the context of nobody ever having your back is fucking exhausting. I remember at a holiday party, one supervisor gathered everyone him to discuss “the true dysfunction” of the person he’d just fired. I thought, “huh, that’s an odd way to be talking about an ex-employee at a company party” followed by “huh, I wonder what you did to piss her off that much–I doubt you’ll tell us.”
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I’m actually OK with not being liked. It’s fine. I know what I’m good at and my style of working with other people, I just need to find the a place that appreciates that.
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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.
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 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. I wanted my agency to see the wrongs, see the people fleeing, have my coworker be honest about the SA that he almost resigned over, and I wanted to be vindicated. But that’s just not what happened.
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 good 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 moral 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 “morale experts” because people breakdown and are seen 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.
Have you considered the possibility that you are in any part culpable for this? I’m not at all saying you are, but I have a few times worked with people that thought they were beyond reproach but were actually just insufferable. Even when they were sometimes correct, they did harm the group by not being able to read the room and work together.
Again, no blame. May not be the case at all here. Just wondering if it had crossed your mind.
I don’t want this whole thread to be about me and my situation, but, yes, I do consider my role in things, absolutely. I also consider the whole context, too, and sometimes I’m reacting in a way that seems bad in isolation, but looked at in context makes TOTAL sense.
A good workplace will work through things with you and listen.
Three weeks ago, I had an issue with a boss making an emotionally-charged and urgent demand on me that was a total reversal of previous policy. I told him I didn’t appreciate it, and he got mad, basically threatening to fire me if I continued the conversation, “be very careful what you say next.” He’s also said the phrase, “You work for me,” more than once to end conversations.
This week he called me into his office to say, “I sense there is something personal between us. Would you like to talk about it?”
And I said, honestly, “No, I’m not comfortable talking with you alone about it.”
And he said, “OK,” with a sense of relief.
So basically, I said “You’ve created a work environment so hostile I am uncomfortable criticizing you in any way for fear of getting fired.” And his response was basically, “Well, thank G*d I don’t have to do anything more about that.”
I mean, ok, I get it, I can be a little rough around the edges, and I’m autistic enough to have been evaluated for autism but not autistic enough to have gotten the diagnosis, but toxic work environments DO exist, and I suspect I am in one.
Edit: I can also add today’s story, where I had a bad reaction to a coworker from another department telling me to do something against policy. She was very rude about it and dismissive and refused to give me an even minimal exception that would justify me violating the policy. I stormed out (autistically?) while my supervisor observed the whole thing.
Later, I asked why my supervisor why she didn’t back me up; she said I overreacted and asked her what exactly I expected of her. I told her I expected her to not let someone from another department harass one of her workers into violating policy. My supervisor just ended the conversation, literally refusing to hear my side of it.
So, like, I’m totally willing to look at my side of things. I shouldn’t have stormed off. But what really irked me more than the disrespect I got from the co-worker was the placid non-defense I got from my supervisor. It just reinforces that people don’t like me there and are perfectly fine treating me like garbage.
Anyway, I also reached out to someone else involved and apparently there WAS a reason behind the request; I don’t think it rose to an exception and I would have refused just the same, but it’s just yet another example of the total lack of respect I get at this workplace that I was expected to violate policy just because someone was telling me to.
This is fine. Everything is fine.
That’s a very thoughtful reply, and I just want to apologize for implying you are a problem at all. Good that this crosses your mind. I’ve definitely been in similar situations, and sometimes I come away thinking, “maybe I was wrong here,” where other times it’s more, “they’re so wrong.” So it goes both ways. I really didn’t mean to make it about you.
But my actual key learning in decades of work is about my own introspection. Recognizing one’s own biases and considering one’s own role in bad vibes is very helpful. Sounds like you do that too.
As an aside, I’ve also found sometimes a situation gets ahead of its own skiis and it is very difficult to change course. I’ve been in workplaces where a group really hates me, and it bums me out because I can sometimes see where it went of the rails… but there is just no putting the train back on the track sometimes and it sucks.
I remember hearing a story about a kid that was getting bullied. The mom tried everything and nothing worked. Was the kid somehow manifesting the bullying? Was it just something about him? They moved the kid to a different school, and, voila, everything was solved.
Sometimes you’re just the scapegoat, the outsider, and there ain’t shit you can do about that. Scapegoating is a powerful social glue.
When I started where I am, there was a woman who was being treated like trash. She was treated with such contempt that she chose to ghost us rather than quit, so HR dragged out her firing for months. Well, guess what happened once she was gone? I became the new scapegoat. It’s just how things work there.
I learned that people are overrated but also needed to make things much easier to be in the know about certain things. Yeah, it’s great being your own person and outside of the influence, but when you know shit, you know the real shit, the drama, what’s going to happen. You’re interested as well.
I, uh, kind of don’t understand what you’re saying.
Hawkeye Pierce has always sort of been my ideal hero–someone able to speak his mind freely because he was indispensable. Unfortunately, I’m not an ace surgeon in a theater of war; I’m highly replacable.
It takes time to become the Hawkeye of any workplace. For me, I feel like I currently am, but it was probably the first 2 of now 5 years of keeping my head down, listening but not contributing to gossip, apologising and correcting “mistakes” that were pointed out, saying yes to extra shifts, etc. But after a while I became someone relied on by all as a truth teller and a solid employee. I sometimes even tell people when explaining my workflow/training, “but I do what I want”. I can always justify my actions even if there is another or zero policy, and my opinion is generally valued. A blessing and a curse, as now the expectations on me are simply higher than for others in similar roles. But, I do what I want.
bwahaha truth teller. bro, being a truth teller is what got me absolutely FUCKED. Can you explain what you mean a little more? Because, yeah, I think employees willing to point out flaws in your organization are fucking gold, but, holy shit, do you need some cred to pull it off.
I was listening to some youtube podcast about work politics, and your “keep your head down” approach, according to one youtuber, would lead you to be overworked by your boss and passed over for promotions because you
a) do everything asked of you and more
b) do not promote yourselfIt’s easier for bosses just to extract value from you, and you are vulnerable to attacks from people who do play politics.
The way to become the “Hawkeye” is to shamelessly promote yourself, protect your reputation among management (fuck what the little people think); they are ethical and unethical ways to do this… but I think I have to get autistic about how I approach politics and treat it as a game while still somehow keeping my integrity and self-respect.
Basically, when you’re well-liked, you get the perks of a community.
But if you’re not-well-liked, you get the cons of being an outcast. And sometimes, the managerial might have a heatseeker for you to be removed.
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.
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.
hmm, someone or maybe whole workplace is trying to get you out of the company.
I think they’re too lazy for that, honestly; haven’t written me up for anything and my last performance review was stellar.
Probably hoping I’ll quit.
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.
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.
