Bored of compensating for unprofessional work culture(s)

June 5, 2019 10:36 AM

I'm a humanist with a strong technical streak, who finally found a niche as a technical writer in IT, and I'm doing OK, financially and professionally better than ever. After almost a decade, though, my personal motivation for putting up with generally unprofessional work culture (micromanagement/randomness/lack of planning/weird hours/half-assing/sexism etc.) in almost every place I've worked is nearly spent, even though I try to develop myself, put in the hours and do an above-average job, and I need the (decent) money to support my young family. How can I get past this without burning out, flipping out, or dropping out?
posted by anonymous to Work & Money (9 answers total)

Go bigger? Work in books (or write one!) that have longer production milestones? Start your own company/agency, or hire a business person to be your agent and BS shield? Do you want to manage people? Perhaps secure the services of a career coach who might have ideas of directions you can go in where you set your own terms for your working life.

The thing about technical writing is that it's always going to be a dependency of someone else's project. What do "badass" technical writers do, if there is a such thing? Do you know of any luminaries in the discipline/industry? Maybe copy them.

Would assertiveness training help?
posted by rhizome at 11:25 AM on June 5, 2019 [1 favorite]

I would sit down and make a list of the specific factors you dislike about your work and try to separate them out from each other, then figure out whether the specific issues are things you can attempt to change and maybe rank them by priority. Lack of planning / weird hours and sexism are two different problems that may or may not stem from the same source (like a poorly structured company or startup culture), and even within those categories there are different flavors: is the sexism something like “women’s contributions are not taken as seriously as men’s” or something like “my coworkers are sexually harassing people in the office”? Then think about what you are willing to exchange to try and lessen the factors that bother you: a pay cut for more regular hours? Becoming “the employee who complains about sexism” to try and lessen the sexism around you?

For example, I’m in an industry wracked with sexism and long hours. But within my industry there are places that tolerate open sexism and crazy hours and last minute assignments, and on the other end of the spectrum, places that fight explicit sexism and have structured hours. I can live with staying in the industry and giving up some pay to stay on the better side of that spectrum. I can live with a lot of things for a job with a reliable “everyone leaves at a normal hour” culture. Some people would not be able to live with that and would want to leave the industry. It’s really all about what you can live with day in and day out.
posted by sallybrown at 11:47 AM on June 5, 2019 [7 favorites]

I have learned the following:

1. Be coachable. If you are coachable and willing to talk with your management very openly and honestly about how you're great and how you're not so great and show a willingness to be led, you will earn a lot of respect, support and trust with upper leadership

2. With that in place, showing up and being a willing team player is 90% of a successful career. Show up with a willingness to engage. You may not always get it perfect, but just showing up and being willing to try is doing more than most people. Be coachable and show up with a willingness to work as a team.

3. With those two things in place, you can then do the thing that will totally transform your professional environment: Be Fearless. You see something that's fucked up, point it out right there on the spot. Your leaders already know you're coachable, showing up, and willing to work as a team, they trust you now, so you can be fearless.

With those 3 things in place, your leadership will support you and back you up when you challenge the organization to expand their range because they already know you're not just some strident asshole, instead they will see you as an extremely valuable leader who they know they can guide across a career arc. You can actually build a highly lucrative career out of being fearless and challenging organizations to be the best versions of themselves, it's what I do, I literally have C-level executives fighting over me and it's weird to be honest...But I get why I'm valuable to them. They know I am capable of politely and professionally not taking any bullshit and fearlessly leading with an expectation that people will expand their range of ability to understand what it means to be a human.

Short form: The goal for changing your professional environment is to achieve total fearlessness.
posted by nikaspark at 12:02 PM on June 5, 2019 [21 favorites]

Or, go freelance. Charge more for clients that are a pain to deal with.
posted by Wild_Eep at 12:16 PM on June 5, 2019 [1 favorite]

nikaspark is spot on for you to be able to affect change within your current organization. If you aren't, though, find another employer who is a better fit. They are out there, and you have the luxury of time to do your search (and reject not-perfect-matches), while you are still gainfully employed at your current job.
posted by Diddly at 12:33 PM on June 5, 2019 [1 favorite]

So I'm a little confused by your list, because some of those things seem like problems that directly affect you, like sexism and micromanagement, but others are more organizational-culture things. I know someone professionally who is also easily frustrated by what he perceives as half-assing, randomness, a lack of rigor in planning, or an overriding of process by executives. He's extremely driven to excel through effort and rigor, and has a really hard time making peace with some of the more frustrating aspects of corporate life, especially if he feels like his time is being wasted. He's not wrong, per se, but I know he'll be a lot happier if he can perceive more than judge (to use the MBTI terms). I encourage him to think of these things as annoyances he can observe, while still getting paid to do work he enjoys.

That's only part of your list, though. Micromanagement and sexism, whether together or separately, have only been solved in my experience by leaving that manager or job (in as much as that "solves" them). That's probably true for weird work hours as well.
posted by chesty_a_arthur at 1:33 PM on June 5, 2019 [2 favorites]

I was thinking about your question and there are a few things I wonder about.

One is your concept of professionalism. Weird hours, for example, aren't always unprofessional. I've worked jobs where my hours were weird by necessity because I was a final step before a deadline or I had to be available to fill in for other people.

The other is do you see these as opportunities for you to learn and grow, or just as wrong things?

Randomness and lack of planning used to drive me nuts too, for example, until I came to peace with the idea that I get paid to trade my services for money and I might as well use that time to get really strong at things that I'm not naturally strong at. I mean, when I'm in control of something, I don't like it random or unplanned, and wherever I can, I work on that.

But where I can't, I just bring my game to each day, however it goes down, and try to learn how to do good work given that reality. I'm not saying stay in a job you hate forever, but if you come to see those things as an organization/manager/team as being at a particular stage of development and your job being to assist in any way and develop solid skills along the way, it gets easier.

I'm not sure I'm wording this right but it's basically...every organization and every manager has weaknesses and strengths. If things are random and unplanned, sometimes that means people develop muscles in focused work under pressure or an ability to react quickly. So rather than seeing everything as Wrong you can see it as a series of choices, and choose to participate fully within those choices and learn from positive and negative experiences.

Half-assing is another weird thing. It depends again on what it is - you can't half-ass surgery. But there is a type of worker who cannot prioritize and ever do anything incomplete, and in some jobs that can be a liability. So again, it may not be you or what you want to do long-term, but learning to half-ass things (or deal with half-assed things) can be a tool in your kit that you can refine with the intention of later only deploying it randomly. It can also be a way to see which things can be half-assed, and which things can't...on a company dime.

Micromanagement is really rough and here for myself my patience might falter. But if it's a manager that is trainable, I think dealing with a period of micromanagement to build trust is again a useful skill and training ground...what things help to decrease it. Which strategies for communication help and which don't.

Sexism...get out, is my answer to that one.
posted by warriorqueen at 2:05 PM on June 5, 2019 [6 favorites]

Are you staff or a consultant? Theoretically, once you develop a successful freelancing business you can start phasing out the worst clients or charging them more to deal with them.
posted by slidell at 2:41 PM on June 5, 2019

When I was going through this kind of thing in my workplace, it really helped me to think of myself as a hired-gun consultant, paid to come in, solve a problem, and leave without getting involved in any BS.
posted by rpfields at 5:07 PM on June 6, 2019 [2 favorites]