by Serguey Shinder
Somebody mentioned it in passing on a Thursday. There had been a call on Monday about the reporting rewrite, four people, forty minutes, and a decision had come out of it. I was not on the invitation and nobody had told me, and the reporting system was mine in every sense that mattered.
I would like to report that my first thought was about the decision. It was not. My first thought was a small hot flare of being slighted, and my second thought, arriving about a second later, was a list of reasons why the decision was probably wrong. I had the list before I had the details. I want to be accurate about the order of those things because the order is the whole point.
I went away and read what they had decided. It was fine. Not what I would have done, but defensible, and on one of the three points it was better than my position, for a reason I had not considered.
So then I had a genuine question on my hands, which was why they had not asked me. I sat with that for a day rather than raising it, mostly out of pride, and by the end of the day I had an answer I did not enjoy. They had a decision to make on Monday afternoon. I was, that week, two days behind on everything, visibly overloaded, and my recent pattern with questions of this kind had been to say I would look at it properly and then not look at it properly for a week.
They had not excluded me. They had routed around a bottleneck, which is what a functioning team does, and the bottleneck was my responsiveness rather than my expertise.
That is an unpleasant thing to conclude about yourself and it is also useful information, which nothing that came from my first reaction was. Being left out felt like a statement about my standing. It was actually a measurement of my availability, and availability is something I control.
What I did about it was smaller than it sounds. I told the four of them the decision was good, which was true and cost me something to say. Then I asked to be told about that class of decision even when they did not want me in the room, because a two-line summary afterwards is cheap and lets me raise an objection if I have a real one. And I started answering that sort of question the same day, briefly, rather than promising a proper look later.
The habit I am trying to build is a pause of about ten seconds between noticing I feel slighted and doing anything at all. Almost every time, the feeling is describing my position and the facts are describing my behaviour, and only one of those is worth acting on.
– Serguey Asael Shinder
Leave a Reply