Corporate life: Misreading subtexts

(Goodbye (and good riddance!) to corporate life and all that. Disclaimer: The "I" here does not necessarily refer to me, and the events and characters in this essay may be a work of fiction. Haha!)

I have this habit of lifting up the spirits of my co-workers around me by acknowledging them openly when they do something that I find genuinely laudable. It’s my way of encouraging people whenever I feel they need some encouragement. No, I’ve never been from HR, but I thought I was just being a typical supervisor, or just trying to be a good co-worker.

I had been cautioned by a well-meaning friend that, in the corporate setting, this attitude of 'up-building' people’s confidence is supposed to be bad. But I didn’t care when I heard that. There’s the risk of being accused as a pleaser, but it felt good making others feel good about themselves, so who cared about risks.

I also have this closely related habit of building up people’s confidence by telling them my comparative faults and weaknesses. For example, I tend to make my praise extra-audible when I find out that, unlike me, a coworker doesn’t suffer from stage fright. Again, in the corporate world, I’ve been told that’s a no-no; what you said about you could be used against you.

And indeed it was true, as I would find out later. Take the case I had with my coworkers D. and N., who were suddenly plucked out from the ranks to be the sudden top managers, bypassing me and several other supervisors. Presumably, these two guys had a qualification I and my co-supervisors lacked: the overconfidence of a big mouth and who knows what else.

So, for constantly praising people I looked upon as worthy, this was what I apparently got: I almost got ditched and, worse, saw myself reporting to these very same individuals and even composing memos for them – when they used to be technically under me! I and several others were very much embarassed to find ourselves outranked without being duly informed, or at least without our egos being properly massaged as precautionary measure. It was a crazy, humiliating situation I couldn’t take for long I just had to resign.

But the manager who did the incredible restructuring of staff was the one who’s really ridiculous. She failed to see that it’s only the really confident who are able to give sincere praise to others – audibly and within other people’s earshot, too, if need be. And it’s only people with healthy self-respect and self-confidence who are able to make fun of themselves or take themselves lightly.

Resigning posthaste was a nice way of extricating myself from the organization, though. It’s where I spent my best years, albeit learning almost nothing for it, if I didn't exert my own efforts to constantly look after my own self-interest and self-growth as well. Thanks to this company, my real day job since Day One has always been to work on outsourced projects (US-based) in different capacities (both rank-and-file and supervisory positions) – abstracting and indexing, legal data processing, even dabbling into corporate information analysis even if I wasn’t an IT guy. I learned a lot of things, alright, but not the areas I really intended to learn. I also had a taste of communicating directly with my American counterparts via speakerphone, which is a little like being in a call center job. When I was about to train for a medical/legal transcription start-up, I was about ready to leave.

Thankfully I was able to make it a point to apply for a position in other companies and be hired and trained before finally and irrevocably shipping out. Without such foresight, I was in danger of being left facing a blank wall - jobless and helpless. I’m grateful that I was able to get out of that tremendous blow to my human dignity with my self-respect and self-confidence fully intact. I am grateful enough that that episode did not have to damage my 'bad habit' of lifting people up.

What’s with lifting people’s spirits anyway? Is it a case of being too honest, or needlessly honest, as in cases where you are asked to enumerate your character weaknesses, aside from your character references, during job interviews? No! Call it an annoying do-goodism, but I have this feeling that people who don’t believe in themselves enough should be encouraged. I think that each person has the potential to be really good at something, so if he or she is properly pushed, 'true talent will out.' Being very talented plus being very lucky, not to mention very confident, are a rare combination in the real world. In the real world, talent alone is not enough. People also need a little encouragement. So I thought it would never hurt to lift people up. I've had a first-hand of experience of not being encouraged enough as well as being discouraged more often than I needed to be, so I knew the feeling so well. I didn't want to inflict what I'd been through to anybody.

Alas, it never occurred to me that trying to be nice for the sake of it can be used as a negative point against myself, when somebody up there in the hierarchy applied my own observations against my favor. If I need to underline the point, note that I was not giving my unstinting praise to people – colleagues above, below, and at a level with my position – as a form of flattery. I really meant it when I said to D. that his booming voice and presence could be put into good use in sales. I meant every word when I told N. that his gift of gab could come in handy not only as a future televangelist, but also when it came to dealing with difficult clients. In short, I didn’t offer good words to kiss people’s bottoms. All that bending would be too counter-productive, a total waste of precious energy.

To his credit, my Filipino boss, the part-owner, treated me well when I declared that I wanted out. My American bosses, on the other hand, gave awkward signals that they could be losing a good human resource, and started sending out feelers that they wanted me to stay. They did so through the same manager, who awkwardly cornered me all of a sudden at the water cooler one morning, offering me a fantastic salary increase that equalled that of the two new managers if I stayed.

Let me tell you, I am used to a lot of insults in life, but I never got more insulted than that day. The whole world knew that I needed money, lots of it, and I didn’t have a problem keeping that as a non-secret. But even during the last moments that we worked together, my manager failed to see that it’s not all about the money! (Not surprisingly, my manager belonged to a family of politicians.)

It’s such an insult for one’s person to be appraised in terms of the cash flow, but business is business; I perfectly understood that cold, calculating side. But it’s a lot more grievous an insult to be reduced as an android or a cyborg with a tag prize neatly stamped on its forehead. It hurt that I ended up being presumed as too money-oriented (‘mukhang pera’). My manager, and the American owners, thought I would bite the carrot stick being dangled right in my face. Politicians have a good expression for this sordid strategy, if only in a vulgar way: “Pera-pera lang naman yan, eh!”

All those years working and living with this manager and her chosen people, treating them as friends and family, and you wake up one day suddenly being diagnosed with the wrong set of character weaknesses, possibly slandered, not to mention bypassed just like that, and made to report to people who were ostensibly not better qualified than you were, who were even defended to be in possession of qualities that you allegedly didn’t have – self-confidence! The manager didn’t see that, although a person may have stage fright, he is just trying to be humble and discreet and kind when he declares his weaknesses out loud. And he can afford to be confident precisely because he is aware of his strengths and limitations, because he is able to have a balanced look at himself. Otherwise, the act of lifting others up would be plain sadomasochism.

This account does not reflect fully the nature of my/our falling-out with this manager. There's also the dimension of affairs of the heart getting in the way. (N. had been wildly rumored to be the manager's paramour, but let's not get into this.) The thing is, it was clear the manager failed to see the sign of self-confidence behind my all-too-audible owning up to my own limitations.

I am now happily employed, thank God, by a new competitor of my former employer. I am struggling with my new job as online English writing tutor, where I am instructed to praise the finer points of a student's work. I am still a part-time freelance writer. I’m thinking about doing my tutoring job fully home-based. I'm thinking about finding other full-time jobs and having this one just a part-time job. I'm thinking about leaving, flying off to the States once and for all, by hook or by crook. I’m tired of office politics for now that I want to take an indefinite leave from the kind of work world I got so used to. Meanwhile, I try my best to be happy for all the colleagues I've left behind.