Sunday, February 10, 2008

I work in Dilbert.

Communication at my job sucks a lot of the time.

Some examples:
My boss walked over to Sabrina's desk one day. He said to her, "Could you tell Candy to do..." She thought to herself, "Or, you could walk two steps in the opposite direction and tell her yourself..."

One day, there was a meeting scheduled in the conference room. Several of my coworkers were sitting in the room waiting for my boss to arrive before they started. As they were sitting there, he emailed them to say he wasn't going to be able to make it. Yup, not exactly the best way to communicate that information...

So, anyway, everyone else at my job had to go through a performance evaluation recently and provide feedback to our boss about how things are going (I didn't because I'm too new). They all told him that, basically, communication sucks. Soooo, my boss's "solution" to this was to have us all take this Meyers-Briggs type test and to schedule a brown bag lunch to discuss communication styles. (Take the test here! I came out as INTJ, the "Mastermind" or the "Logical Visionary"...) Our meeting on this test started off with my boss saying that he didn't think the test came up with the right type for him, so he told us what type he thought he was instead. He didn't prepare anything for us to discuss about the test. However, I did make copies of a handout on Meyers-Briggs, which everyone had and sat and stared at for a while. Another woman that I work with took the initiative to ask everyone what their profile was and write it on the whiteboard. Overall, the meeting was disorganized and nothing was really communicated too well. Cindy had the same profile as me and during the meeting she talked a lot about how it's important to have clear definitions of what it is we're doing and how it is important to touch base with each other on a regular basis. After she was done talking, my boss called on me to ask if I agreed with everything she said because, obviously, if we had the same profile, we're clones or something...

Ah, yes...

1 comment:

Emily said...

Holy Lord, this made me laugh. A lot.

I've taken that Myers-Briggs thing a couple of times. Each times one of my letters flips. I think the last time I took it it said I was INFJ--Counselor?

I LOVE that your boss just picked the one that he thought was most like him. God, that's hilarious. And a "brown bag lunch"??? Hahahahaha!!!! Man, that's great. Yet not...