The American view: The performance review Hunger Games

Esmerelda was thrilled to hear it. She explained that she was helping arrange Bob’s going away party since he was finally eligible to retire. Good for him, I said.

 

Then she asked if I could explain some things on Bob’s CV that were likely going to be mentioned by the MC. Esmerelda figured I would know the answers since Bob and I had been friends. Her words.

 

Ehhhhh … not so much, I said. “Bob and I were friendly,” I explained, “but we were never friends.” I didn’t know much about Bob’s past other than the stories he’d told me that he thought would paint him a good light. We worked together, sure. I helped him stay employed, sure. But friends? No. Not even close.

 

My last few years with that organisation were fraught with political and interpersonal drama. Stories of those days have appeared in my byline many times. [2] The company was a cesspit of political infighting and petty backstabbing. Honestly, the setting would have been perfect for a late-night primetime drama series. Terrible place to work, though.

 

Bob and I got along well, mostly because we had a common enemy in the form of our universally hated supervisor. We helped one another (and our respective suborganisations) evade our boss’s Caligula-lite arbitrary persecutions so that our people could remain employed. We cooperated to improve our workers’ quality of life and to keep our respective functions running. We had a common interest. That made us allies.

 

We also got along well from an interpersonal perspective. We joked around, helped keep the office vibe positive, and took the piss out of our stuffed-shirt executives. That was why Esmerelda assumed the two of us had been friends. She’d seen our pleasant banter and misinterpreted it. Our jocularity had been social lubricant, not a show of mutual respect.

The reality was that we were rivals within the department. We held effectively identical supervisory positions. All the functional supervisors at our level were being equally abused by our department head. [3[ Therefore, us line bosses banded together for mutual protection and to resist our superiors’ attempts to pit us against one another. “Just say “#&@ NO!” to Taylorism, if you like.

 

Friendly cooperation helped get things done. At the same time, our organization’s dysfunctional culture strove to drive everyone apart: Keep the workers alienated, squelch dissent, and make the workers fight one another. The survivors of that culture mostly internalized the competitive aspect; a “friend,” to those folks, was and expendable ally. You help one other only so long as there’s no “cost” to you in doing so. Once an ally was compromised, you discarded them like soiled bog roll. That ain’t a “friend.”

 

To be fair to Esmerelda, I did make some lifelong friends while I worked at that company. I sent a hilarious pun to one of them this morning and got a soul-weary groan back. That’s friendship right there! But those friends were few and far between. People that will risk their own precarious position to stand by a mate are, I’ve found, rare in the American business world.

 

The incessant “all for none and one against all” corpo mindset means that friends are often incorrectly perceived as an exploitable liability. Obviously, your mileage will vary based on the type of work you do and the peculiarities of your specific Organisation. Across the swathe of American businesses, however, upper management’s default approach is still Diet Taylorism: keep your workers paranoid, anxious, and more suspicious of one another than of management so they don’t notice how badly they’re being cheated and abused. 

 

One last note: I’m not saying that this way of life is correct or that one shouldn’t try to forge real friendships in the working world. Exactly the opposite, in fact! True friendships — those relationships built on trust, respect, mutual obligation, and loyalty make the working world better for everyone. They’re also devastatingly effective at defending against your employer’s cruelties. It’s a lot easier to fight back against a crap boss and the full weight of your employer’s personnel harassment systems when you know you have someone you can trust watching your back. Perhaps that’s why business leaders are so keen to keep us all paranoid of one another …

 

 

[1] See False Prophets: The Gurus Who Created Modern Management And Why Their Ideas Are Bad For Business Today by James Hoopes.

[2] Always anonymized, of course.

[3] Just like we’d all been abused by her predecessor, and by his predecessor, and so on. An ouroboros of proctological aggravation.