Playing the Game

My goals for the winter were to stay healthy, lose weight, write regularly…so far I have not managed to accomplish any of those goals, really. Thankfully I have managed to keep my rosacea in check this winter (but that’s another posting).

Here’s what I really want to say right now. There are a lot of things that have been going on around here that I need to write about. But here is what is on my mind first and foremost. Over winter break, I was asked to take a freelance job in which I read a text book and wrote quizzes. The book was for business communicators, and included things like how to facilitate effective business meetings, how to write effective meeting minutes, how to stick to a meeting agenda when one person dominates the meeting….the list goes on. I found myself thinking, really? Is this really necessary? Isn’t this common sense? And then I remembered how lost and befuddled I felt when I started my first job after college, how the whole corporate culture (and later, higher education) was so foreign to me (especially since I had been a liberal arts English major).

So then I started thinking…what would have prepared me for the culture of corporate America or higher education? And I had a sad thought, which was recently only further confirmed for me based on something that is happening to a friend. In school, you’re judged by your performance. You do the work, participate, follow the rules and requirements, and then receive graded feedback. But in the professional world, you’re judged not so much by your talent or your impact on the people you are serving as you are judged by your capacity to play the game. Your best chance of survival and advancement lies in your ability to form alliances with key people who are in the best position to get you what you want, to secure a prominent place in the valuable flow of information known as the grapevine, so that you are always poised to make your next power play, and to recognize and be alert for the power plays that are constantly going on around you so that you may use them to your advantage…..you must become intricately connected to the politics of the culture and play the game at all times. On a daily basis I watch this going on—it usually involves pitting people against each other—and I try not to get pulled in to it.

The sad truth is…if you refuse to play the game, if you actually choose to be the bigger person and focus on your job, you will eventually be knocked out of the game.