Ta-dah! List

[oak]

I got it approved by the boss! Unprecedented…

What have you done with BeanyBoo? We will pay any price to get him back.

All joking aside, I hardly recognize you. Well done!

And, please do keep us posted about the results of the survey, especially the results vis a vis WFH and in-office.

[Beany Boo]

Thank you Oak

Don’t get me wrong. I did get it approved. After an hour of his pressured speech (disordered) and listening to him talk about himself, I got it approved. He is still processing feedback he got from the Clin. Psychologist. He’s clearly struggling with it. At one point he referred to himself as ‘the greatest listener in the world’. All I can say is I’m glad I was wearing a face mask; easier to hide my expression.

Anyway, I seemed to have absorbed very little damage from it and recovered well overnight. I guess this is practice for some amazing feat of negotiating on the horizon.

[Beany Boo]

So I published my survey today. A third of the department have responded which is amazing. Their answers are great. I feel really good about it.

On the momentum of that, I thought I’d stick my hand right in the fire! I drafted a second survey about the staff feedback process.

This is the sore-point in my workplace.

Staff need to ask for direction from the boss, on work related tasks. Somehow he almost takes it personally that they don’t know as much as him, or don’t just think like him or that they can’t read his mind.

They ask and he embarrasses them.

The survey tries to get buy in - on both sides - to an improvement in the way staff deliver their requests, and then in the quality, kindness and brevity of information the boss provides.

The boss approved my first draft!

I’m not entirely happy with it but I feel like I have the capacity to improve it to where it can be published.

The ta-dah! is my hand going further into the fire.

[Beany Boo]

So I rewrote my second survey. It percolated overnight. Percolated, although I didn’t ruminate at all. I came in and scrapped the first draft. The boss approved the new version. It seemed to calm him down. He said he liked it in a tone I’d never heard before.

I made it simpler and more specific. I just focused in on how we communicate day to day and how to raise issues in a psychologically safe way. I showed it to a few colleagues and they proof read it. They also were surprisingly supportive. Then I published it.

I couldn’t get over how accepting everyone was of both surveys. Almost everyone in the office has completed the first one already.

I can’t say I’m happy; just humbled; which maybe feels better than happy.

The ta-dah! was the faith I had to decide the survey could be better; and how I held that during the night.

[manuel_moe_g]

So I rewrote my second survey. It percolated overnight. Percolated, although I didn’t ruminate at all.

...

The ta-dah! was the faith I had to decide the survey could be better; and how I held that during the night.

Such healthy and mature stuff, <emotionally> you are several heads taller than me in stature, Beany <kinda envious >

[Beany Boo]

Well, it’s a ta-dah! because it’s the first time I’ve done that and been conscious of it. I’ll take your compliment wholeheartedly nonetheless though.

To be fair it wasn’t too difficult. My thesis for the survey was broadly, to view ‘kindness’ as a value (just like say, money) that could flow through the business if the obstacles to it could be removed. That’s a version of something I genuinely believe in (without effort).

So the amount of emotional labor I had to do overnight was actually in the negative. It wasn’t difficult to keep to my position.

[Beany Boo]

My co-worker entered a borderline defamatory comment in one of my surveys. He wasn’t responding to questions, it was just a bald attack on the boss. Because the survey was published on the cloud, I couldn’t publish the results without the boss and every other member of staff reading the comment.

The comment wasn’t incorrect. It just derails my assignment; off the cloud.

I had to take a whole day to recreate both my surveys’ results from the ground up in Excel, with the comment taken out, and publish my very average looking pdf version instead.

It’s not a total loss. I’ll still probably pass my assignment. I feel a bit used I guess. My co-worker wasn’t to know, but he cost me. I still maintained the anonymity of the survey. I just both protected him and, for better or worse, censored him.

Knowing the full story, I realize now the lived effect the boss’s ignorance of diversity is having on people. That’s what the comment was more or less about.

Hopefully there’s a chance for this survey to be about making exactly that kind of improvement. That would definitely make this stumble worth it.

The ta-dah! is my co-worker accidentally putting his livelihood in jeopardy because he cared more about being treated respectfully than he knew about how cloud communication works.

[manuel_moe_g]

You are doing important work, Beany

[Beany Boo]

Today, a woman sitting on the street remembered me and grinned. I’d given her a pochibukuro about a week earlier. Her kindness made me want to cry with gratitude.

The ta-dah! was the weight of feeling in her modest grin.

[manuel_moe_g]

You sow seeds that bear fruit, Beany! Great stuff!