Everyone has an agenda. This is not about working in the oil and gas industry or even something I learned from work. However, it is something I have become acutely more aware of since I started working. In particular, as I have spent more time managing people, and will do a fair bit of it this week for various reasons, the agendas that different people promote are becoming increasingly obvious. And those whose clearly differ from mine are the most absolutely aggravating to work with.
The thing about everyone's agendas is that they're all different. And having to work closely with others makes those differences all the more apparent. (There I go again, using a word in a somewhat misleading fashion. Agenda is perfectly good word to use to describe what I mean, but by phrasing it the way I have, I certainly have made all these agendas sound far more nefarious than any of them really are.) The issue becomes a matter of divining how different your agenda is from that of your employer and also figuring out what everyone else's is up to. You might think I could use the word goal instead of agenda (and sound much less sinister). However, I don't feel that it's quite apt since everyone has an agenda, but very few people actually have goals. They might not realize it's an agenda, especially when they mistake it for actual goals.
Yesterday, I hoped work would inspire me and it has. Today, it reminded me once again of the divergent agendas that people enjoy promoting. A couple weeks ago, I wrote about communication. Not to get too far off topic but this is a tangent of both that topic and this one. There's a curious irony at work. I am given a fairly large amount of decision making authority yet simultaneously have no actual power to discipline those who do not follow instructions. In the organizational chart, while I am laterally higher than some people, I am no one's actual manager. (The true irony is that if I ever badly erred, I could always feign ignorance and say I should never have been asked to make certain decisions, but that would be disingenuous and is not something I would ever do.) How does this relate to agendas? Once again, I can only persuade people to my own since there is no threat of discipline that I can command. Therefore, the agendas of others are not only something I see, but also something I must continually negotiate against.
There is far more to say about this, but now is not the time.
2 comments:
And you will be negotiating against the agendas of others forever. Against women, too. It is what we call give-and-take.
It will be interesting to see what else you have to say on this subject. Perhaps some of my comments in my 2/2/06 email will provoke a response or an idea.
Managing people is the hardest job in running a business regardless what business you are in. Lots of books tell you what to do but hardly tell you how to do it right! Having an agenda is not bad, at least you know where they are coming from and deal with it accordingly. It gives you a chance to practice the skill of diplomacy.
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