Deep Dive, among other things…

Long time since my last post, i did try in between to try and open the BLOG and maybe key in a few words.

My mind and body had other plans though as I was in a deep dive among other things and had no creative juices flowing whatsoever. If you have been to a lot of sites that post material as to how recruitment companies function, you would have understood the term “Deep Dive” by now.

A “Deep Dive” is taken by people who are inundated with work and have not come up for fresh air for a very long period of time. This is what is happening with me currently, to cut a long story short I undertook an exercise at work which demands all the energy and time I have. We are working as passionately as we possibly could and hoping that in the end the vast amount of learning’s we gained will speak volumes about us professionally. The pity is that not the entire team believes in the exercise completely and when you don’t have buy-in from the team it’s difficult to manage and share your enthusiasm.

The benefits of the exercise are massive from professionally to the unique experiences it gives us. However majority of the team don’t share the same opinion and this is where an ideological conflict is driving a wedge between all concerned. This is the typical conflict situation that people often ask about in interviews, the classic questions are

“How do you handle someone in the team who refuses to see reason and work as part of the team?”

“How do you handle employees who knowingly underperform?”

My two cents worth is that I still don’t have my finger on it yet. I did observe that if people are working to earn and are just using the profession to get by and this is what they would not do given other opportunities, then you would start facing this conflict soon.

There is no easy solution to handle conflict, that’s why it’s called a conflict in the first place. It’s a toss-up between ignoring the people who don’t believe and moving on like a soldier with a purpose to not giving up and trying to utilize people for whatever task they are good at.

In case a person does not believe in working in a team, there is no way you can convince them otherwise. Leave them be, find the true soldiers in your team who are willing to take chances and try sometimes to make what you do sound interesting in the hope that all will follow. You cannot physically force anyone to be interested.

Sometimes this conflict can be frustrating and even though you want to ignore it and move on and channel your energies, its still there at the back of your head. Tune it out; life is too short to waste time on correcting ideologies.

The world is filled with such conflicts; let’s blame it on genetics partially as people are who they are because it’s encoded in their DNA.  Partially lets blame it on circumstances, situations and experiences add on to the way we treat ourselves and other people in our lives. But why is that some people learn and get better and some people tend to linger and continue to build an alternate reality for themselves?

Don’t know the answer to this as well, maybe they feel comfortable in that alternate reality and maybe they don’t have the capability to be symbiotic. Not everything in nature can be adaptable to human life I guess!

But here is the crux of the conflict, it’s agreed by now that we will not try to force people on board, but can they afford us the same fair treatment? Is it possible for them to not mock other people’s sincerity and make it out to be very vague and superficial?

Is it possible that they don’t make disparaging remarks and leave people who really do their job because they enjoy it alone? Not a chance.

This is where I am truly perplexed as well, I resolve not to get angry or disappointed when people don’t match my expectations but the conflict is soon rearing its head in my face and asking me to react. I realized the only way out of this is to simply ignore their existence, literally. Say to yourself, that in your world these people have no place and you have things to do and places to go. Or maybe give them a fair dose of their own treatment, but then we would not be any different than them…

Less than Gandhian solution but I will have to live with it till something better comes along.

Meanwhile got to dive back to the bottom, more work to do. if anyone has any ideas on this topic, feel free to comment.

Ciao!

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