14 August 2006

Monday (again) - Suspicions about Anne

I'm getting really slack at keeping the blog up to date for which I can only apologise. The trouble is I have too much real life going on at the moment and sometimes writing this makes me feel like I'm just living all of the bad bits - twice!

I've noticed a couple of things about Anne. Maybe I'm a bit slow but it seems that Jez, and anyone in his team can do no wrong. It doesn't matter how little Anne thought of them prior to joining his team, once they're in they're angels. Kate is a case in point. I had to battle to get her efforts recognised when she was in my team. Now she's in Jez's, she only has to turn up and she's employee of the month. But it doesn't stop there.

After my run in with 'the most arrogant man in the world' last week. I had to provide Anne with a full investigation of the incidents leading up to his complaint. I can't go into detail here but it is partly although not entirely connected to a failure of one of our accounting processes. I explained this to Anne on my brief. She didn't believe me. She asked me questions about the account process. I answered them and explained exactly how it works and why in this case it didn't for this customer. She took my file and shooed me out of her cave, thanking me, but only as an afterthought from her 'getting the best from your employees training module.'

I overheard her putting the same questions to Jez a short while later, and Jez, knowing the same about processes as I do, gave her exactly the same answers that I did. With one difference.

She believed Jez.

Is it that I don't sound convincing? Does my nose grow and spout leaves when I talk to people? Why wouldn't Anne believe me but listen to Jez even though he is saying the same thing that I am.

It appears to both me and Tracey (I caught her crying after one nasty run-in with her earlier) that Anne judges people by her own perception of them rather than the reality. As a result, in Anne's mind, Jez is a hard-working, strong willed, disciplanarian who really brings his team on.

In my view, Jez is a bolshy slacker, who does what he can to appease his team members (ie; long lunches, leave agreed whenever they want it without department needs considered) and then
blags everything the rest of the time. But my view doesn't count. I'm not signing the appraisals.

If the most successful people in the company are the biggest bullshitters, someone had better have a large shovel handy.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Amazing. This came up in an IT customer service meeting today. You may not believe that IT would have a meeting on that subject, but it's a new committee composed of the 20 folks in our 300-member IT dep't who don't need customer service training.

The sum total of my contribution was the idea that often people just need to hear the same thing from two different people before they'll believe it. To be sure, you'd have to set up a test case where Jez told her something first that she couldn't believe and then you would tell her the same thing youself and see how she reacted.

Also, my guess is that Jez is overhyping his team members.