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Minefield? Hardly.

The realm of human relationships in the workplace is supposedly just such a place.

But it isn’t. In a minefield you don’t know where the explosive devices are buried. You don’t even know any are buried there until someone steps on one.

In the workplace, though, if you don’t know where every mine is buried by now, you haven’t been paying attention. Just in case:

> Physical contact. A handshake is the limit. If you think your colleague really needs a hug, you might be right. Needing one from you, though, is another matter. Unless you’re absolutely certain a hug from you would be welcome, keep it verbal, not physical.

> Repeated, unwanted attention. It’s a myth that one employee can’t ask another employee out for a date because that might constitute unwanted attention. The fact of the matter is, nobody on the offering side of the equation can know if their attention is wanted until it’s offered. Have you asked and been turned down? Now you know. Don’t ask again.

> Any hint of romantic intentions in a power relationship. Power = compulsion whether intended or not, and it isn’t okay no matter what signals you think you’re receiving.

> Overt sexual attention: Don’t. If you find this surprising, or you disagree, you need more help than KJR can give you.

> Any hint of tribal disparagement. If you sincerely believe a racial, ethnic, political, or religious group has undesirable characteristics, you’re welcome to your belief. You aren’t welcome to express it. The same goes for your thoughts about human genders and what they’re like. You also aren’t allowed to express your thoughts in the form of a joke — no matter how funny you’re sure it is — or to use pejorative identifiers in conversation, or to use “Jew” as a verb.

> Don’t call grown women “girls.” If you’re a guy, it’s demeaning. If you’re a woman, you’re encouraging guys to call them girls.

> Anger mismanagement. We in the workforce are human beings, not robots … at least, not yet. Any of us, in a given circumstance, might find ourselves afflicted with TSD (tantrum spectrum disorder). People who suffer from TSD express their unhappiness on a scale that has rage at one end and annoyance or irritation at the other. Except that if the expression is anywhere beyond irritation it’s the people around us who suffer.

That’s about it. Except that it isn’t, because everything above this paragraph is about what you shouldn’t do. Which is fine and useful if you want to avoid running afoul of Human Resources, which surprisingly enough tends to get these about right in most organizations and circumstances.

But … and this is, if you’ll forgive the expression, a big but … while the above advice keeps you out of trouble and the company out of court, it has nothing to do with career success.

Quite the opposite, if you focus your attention on staying out of trouble you’ll ignore the factor that, more than any other, determines your professional success: how well you manage your interpersonal relationships.

If you’ve read the KJR Manifesto (Keep the Joint Running: A Manifesto for 21st Century Information Technology, and if you haven’t … seriously? What’s wrong with you?) … if you’ve read it you understand the two ironclad relationship rules: Relationships Precede Process and Relationships Outlive Transactions. That is, no business process can survive distrust among those responsible for making it work. And very few battles are worth winning if they do serious damage to your working relationship with the people you’re battling with.

I know people who think “being professional” means keeping their personalities in abeyance, sharing nothing of themselves with their teammates, and in general doing their best impression of Commander Spock, only without the hand gesture and “live long and prosper” expression of goodwill.

If this is you … if you think you have to rein it in so far that nobody knows who you are and what you’re really thinking and feeling … it’s time for a re-think. There certainly are times and situations where Spockism is the best choice you have. In particular, when those around you are becoming increasingly excitable, the contrast alone will serve you in good stead.

Also, see TSD, above: If you find yourself sliding beyond irritation to exasperation and beyond, Vulcanizing yourself is just the ticket.

But for day-to-day interactions with your staff, managers, and peers, strong positive relationships are far superior to neutral ones.

So be a person. Not only will it make you more successful, it will make your days more pleasant as well.

Students of corporate behavior, attempting to account for the seemingly incomprehensible level of self-destruction evident everywhere in the business world, often find themselves at a loss. Why, they ask, would a business do something like this, whatever “this” is this time?

The answer is usually easy to find, if you know where to look: Businesses can’t be self-destructive, for the simple reason that businesses aren’t selves. Human beings make the decisions, either individually or in groups.

Some of these individuals and groups make their decisions with the good of the company in mind, even though “The Company” is a fictional beastie that lacks any actual intent, consciousness, or independent reality. Others focus on “shareholder value,” showing an admirable, albeit misguided altruism toward their employer’s legal owners — misguided because their altruism is rarely returned by the shareholders whose interests they hold paramount.

The majority of decision-makers do neither. They base their decisions on exactly the criteria they’re supposed to use in a capitalist society: They look out for their own best interests. Often, their best interests have nothing at all to do with what’s best for the company.

How else to explain the following event:

A character arrives from corporate headquarters. Looking in the mirror, he sees a secret agent looking back. Or maybe he thinks he lives in The Matrix. Hard to tell.

“Why are you here?” the head of security asks him.

“I can’t tell you.”

“What are you planning to do?”

“I can’t tell you that, either.”

“What can you tell us?”

“I need a work space with a network connection, telephone, desk and chair. And please don’t interfere with what I’m doing.”

He’s from the holding company’s headquarters. A quick check confirms he has the authority and the right to ask for this, and so it is done. A few weeks later, he packs up and leaves, having downloaded a number of security intrusion tools used to … keep in mind, this is a true story, not paranoid fiction … break into and damage several production servers, thereby proving, I guess, that the network is vulnerable to someone from headquarters connected inside the firewall, with no oversight or supervision, no responsibilities other than breaking into the network, and the authority to insist on being ignored regardless of his actions.

From a security audit perspective, his behavior is unprofessional on at least two counts. The first, of course, is that he did actual damage instead of simply leaving evidence of his successful entry.

But that’s the lesser example of the complete worthlessness of his efforts. The greater is that he ignored the basics. The test of an organization’s security isn’t whether it can be hacked, let alone whether it can be hacked from inside its firewall. The test … actually, the two tests of any organization’s security are (1) Does the organization’s security policy fit its needs? and (2) Does the organization’s actual security implement its security policy?

Since Mr. Bond never bothered to read the security policy, he’ll never know. All he knows is that it’s possible to penetrate his subsidiary’s firewall from inside the firewall.

An impressive performance.

How does one go about explaining behavior this bizarre? It requires neither a conspiracy theory nor a temporary shortage of Thorazine.

All it requires is an understanding that everyone in every company acts solely in their own best interests. It’s up to the company’s leaders to ensure their best interests line up with those of the company, and that they understand this alignment.

At a guess, HQ’s secret agent saw a possibility of career advantage from showing up the subsidiary’s IT staff. Viewed in this light, his behavior makes perfect sense: By engineering a situation in which he couldn’t fail to successfully intrude, he can claim to have revealed serious security deficiencies. And because he works at corporate headquarters, he figured he could use his superior access to decision-makers to paint any objections to his behavior by the subsidiary’s IT staff as nothing more than a defensive attempt to cover up incompetence.

I’m speculating, but at least this explains this odd event. Viewed from any other perspective, the behavior of this strange visitor from another city would be incomprehensible.

I take that back. There is one other perspective that would explain it.

Maybe he’s just stupid.