To a degree, I could care less about how much, or how little experience you have.  You are in that position for a reason, and that's that.  I work - and take direction from people who were in diapers when I did my first tour - if not just a candy bar in their daddy's back pocket - but, they are in charge.  It's their show.  We do it their way.  If you want to argue, go into politics.

Had the attitude been that it was his show, I'd not have minded much.  I approached it in the way of "what the boss says is what I do."  The way I documented that it would not work was to follow the plan exactly, and keep careful documentation that my steps were what was required by the plan.  Where it broke down was that person in question was always shielded from the consequences of his plans failing, with it instead falling on the rest of the department.  Seeing this, he increased the frequency of conflict, enjoying causing problems for the rest of us (a fact he directly admitted.)

I'm not about conflict, and I think that is a very immature view of how things get done.  The Golden Gate Bridge and Empire State Building were not built on argument, but on cooperation.  By people working together, not apart.

Quote from: Leslie Ann on October 18, 2008, 05:06:51 AM
Some men thrive on being confrontational.

some women, too.

i am often seen as "blunt".  i havnt really noticed as a gender thing, i jut thought i was like that.  hmm... something to chew on i guess.

Yeah, I don't think being confrontational or blunt is a gender thing.

I think that society is all about socializing us that those are gender things, though.

I tend to be both Timid and Confrontational.  I'll ignore or not say something at first, but eventually I break and Confront them sometimes rather fiercely.  I'm also very defensive too, somewhat overly defensive might say.

Though the thing I really hate that I do is I'm afraid of hurting someone, yet can't avoid being blunt.  So I apologize all the time too, even though I'm not sorry for saying something I feel sorry that it may have hurt them.   I'm to soft lol.

Ive always been a fairly even tempered individual unless really provoked and then I see red and have a hard time controlling my temper but once calmed down its over and I rarely harbor a grudge. On the other side of the coin It seems I'm alway apologizing for the dumbest things. You could bump into something and I'd probably tell you I was sorry. Drives me to distraction.

One thing I have found out in the last several months after going on a daily regimen of anti depressants is that my anxiety level was causing a lot of the confrontational issues and I have since seemed to calm down and handle things better even at work. Hugs

Wendy

Quote from: tekla on October 19, 2008, 10:43:03 PM
I'm not about conflict, and I think that is a very immature view of how things get done.  The Golden Gate Bridge and Empire State Building were not built on argument, but on cooperation.  By people working together, not apart.

I have not said you are.  What I have been saying is only from my experience of operations at a prior employer where conflict was standard operating procedure.  The fact that the process in that department was so oppositional and a person trusted by management refused to work cooperatively was the very reason projects were routinely late and, not infrequently, outright failures.  In spite of the seriously negative effects that person caused, management's view of him remained positive, likely in part for their stated view that competition, not cooperation, was the better approach on the micro scale.  The projects in question were far smaller than the grand structures you mention, in fact many were small enough only one person would be assigned, but not being assigned to that project did not stop the co-worker in question.  Had we been trying to do something along that scale I don't think it an exaggeration to say we'd be lucky to have yet broken ground with how the interference was left unmanaged.

Cooperation is a wonderfull thing in and of itself and does cause many great feats to become acomplished however its only one side of a coin that requires 2 sides to maintain balance. Properly stuctured confrontation brings about change and refreshes new ideas if everyone jsut stayed with the old norm then nothing would change and you would have stagnation and decay. Beside its not in human nature for everyone to always get along perfect on every issue our viewpoints and opinions are what makes us unique as individuals and sometimes we feel the need to express these viewpoints to others for various reasons. Confrontation just for the sake of argument is generaly negative and unproductive however debates can be fun if structured right and both sides are enjoying the mental stimulation. The most unproductive and worst kind of confrontation though is definatly when things devolve into violence.

It's really a very complex thing.  In my experience, both cooperation and competition can produce important advances when used properly, but if used improperly, they can effectively waste time and money, and generate no small amount of ill will.  There are many points about what is proper and improper.  The major one at issue in my experience there was when each was appropriate.  I generally feel that in the planning phase debate/argument is acceptable, the earlier in it the better.  Some arguments can probably be made for early parts of the implementation phase, but when it's months in and now days or hours before the deadline is simply too late for debate to begin.  The person in question would only raise objections at that eleventh-hour.

The objection raised was invariably that we were doing things differently, and it seemed that no advance was worth the change, so, by arguing more of the usual, that person was guaranteed to win.  The resulting overrun and/or failure was simply seen as proof of the wisdom of staying with the tried and true.

The mood among my non-managerial coworkers definitely changed once that person quit.  Our manger hated that we never sat down in a conference room and formally debated things after that point (to his view, we weren't debating at all) but it really wasn't necessary.  Most of us were very interested in what was happening in our industry and how we could improve by using what had become available.  In the computing field, there was a great deal of this, too, but it also meant change was regularly forced.  This was also the most common reason for the failure after those objections - they'd demand we do things exactly as they had been for years but the software no longer worked that way so it wasn't possible (although that fact was never a strong enough counter-argument.)