I ain’t talkin’ to some junior

There comes a moment in your career when you get a telling off and you just don’t see it as such.

Some people seek to establish their assumptions as facts and resort to a telling off as a power move

You don’t actually experience a swelling of Braveheart-esque defiance. You don’t go ‘no, this time I will stand my ground’. Or at least I didn’t.

You don’t experience it as a pivotal moment at all.

You just… don’t experience the power dynamic of the telling off.

You are meant to, but you don’t.

You don’t put your head down and go ‘yup, yup, got it, apologies, I will rework, do better next time’, or whatever.

You go ‘see… no. We disagree here’.

There is a first time when someone tries to tell you off and you go ‘you don’t get to do that, you get to disagree, that’s all you get to do’. And you do it without realising that’s what you’ve done.

Make no mistake: seniority doesn’t come with promotion. It comes after promotion, when you first do this without steeling yourself first. When you believe that your view of the world is as valid as the opposing view that is being thrown at you.

Which means, yes, a lot of very senior people are still working on this.

And it also means, yes, that without seniority you have a fight on your hands. You can still fight it. But it’s different.

And look.

We all get told off at work. It never stops by the way, in case you were wondering. Sometimes it is necessary. But mostly it isn’t about you or what happened or what needs to happen next but rather all about the person doing the telling.

Some people can’t help themselves. Some people find that scolding or shouting or chastising or blaming creates a power dynamic that suits them.

Some people default to it.

Our hierarchical organisations lend themselves to it.

Our angry cultural default modes inside our orgs also don’t help here. Or help, in all the wrong ways.

And there is this thing that humans do inside and outside the office: we often accept the context others create for us. I have written about not accepting the premise of the question before. And I have spoken again and again about the compelling dynamic created by the force field of someone not presenting facts as such but presenting facts based on assumptions and opinions that are themselves implied as facts.

That twice removed conviction is insidiously compelling.

And when someone tells you off, whether they are right or wrong in the specifics, is such a moment. Implicit in the telling off is the assumption that they are permitted and empowered to do what they are doing. That they are correct in the specifics. And that you will take it.

And mostly… you do.

Because the mise-en-scène is too powerful to resist and you are ‘cast’ in the role you are meant to play and habit kicks in. You are put in a defensive position and you accept it. Mostly.

But a moment comes when you don’t.

You don’t take it, because you don’t notice it’s meant to be a telling off. You don’t see or don’t accept the implicit power dynamic. You yank the proverbial handbrake.

With hindsight, in my case it had a hilariously jarring effect. Nobody expects you to not accept their premise. They are used to getting away with defining reality.

They are used to not being contradicted. They are used to having the first word and by extension the last word. They are used to putting people down when they choose to. Lifting them up when they choose to.

As a woman and an immigrant in this industry, I have the dubious honour of being the person who introduces the notion of boundaries and highlights default double standards in many a conversation. It’s still a shock to the recipient but it’s not a shock to me. It’s banal in its ubiquitousness.

Their shock doesn’t shock me. Their surprise doesn’t amuse me.

I know they will do it again. And again. And again.

There is no joy in stopping them. It’s thankless work, just like housework: it has to be done and, if you don’t do it, it piles up. But doing it doesn’t ever mean you are done with it.

The joy comes when you see someone reach that point of not taking it and resisting the premise of the question without a fight or any grandstanding but by genuinely looking puzzled and going ‘no, I don’t think so’.

That point is magical.

Mine was my then boss giving me hell because I let the juniors in the team present their own work. It was a telling off. It was not a suggestion. It was, apparently, a sign of weak leadership and it made it look like the juniors had done a lot of the work, he said.

Which of course they had. As they always do. As they were meant to do.

And at that moment I didn’t have an internal struggle. I didn’t go ‘oh my god, this is the moment’. I just thought ‘what a load of…’ and said very simply that we fundamentally disagree on both our management styles and on the importance of giving people the opportunity to stand by their work, with the knowledge that this work has been reviewed and stands up to scrutiny.

The work is always presented by those who do it. It is a key and unshakable belief of mine.

We were all juniors once. Someone trained and managed us. If I train and manage them, not letting them own their work surely is a testament of self-doubt… or is it a need to show that I’ve done something and the only way to do that is claim other people’s work as mine?

I’ve had my work appropriated one too many times to ever do that to anyone by omission or commission.

So yeah. My job is to frame their work and support their development, their job is to do the work and the learning and the growing and get better than me.

Isn’t it obvious?

Evidently, not to him it wasn’t. And it’s not obvious to so many senior managers in our industry. As it is not obvious to the enabling clients who refuse to talk ‘to some junior’ giving life expectancy to the pretence that people after a certain level in their career still do their own slides.

Anyway.

This is the hill I’m dying on, if I have to. There aren’t many of those, but there are a few and they are non-negotiable for me. And with seniority I have realised they are not battles I need to fight. They are conversations I need to nip in the bud. An attempted telling off that becomes a boomerang. A point of view that is boxed in to be just that: a view that I don’t agree with and don’t need to justify my actions and choices against.

Let me tell you: people seek to establish their assumptions as facts many times a day and resort to the superiority of a telling off as a power move, consciously or unconsciously.

I take no pleasure in putting boundaries up. I do it because it needs doing.

But I confess I take great pleasure in seeing people flick the switch from ‘taking it’ to seeing it for what it is and rejecting the premise of the question they see as fundamentally flawed. I love seeing that moment in others and it took some thinking to work backwards and figure out when was mine.

And once I found it, I thought, oh yeah. That was the moment when it felt different. That was the moment when I went ‘oh I don’t think so’ to the low-level power play. When I didn’t see criticism and I didn’t see a fight that needed to be fought. I just saw a profound divergence of opinion I didn’t need to engage with in obedience or fight. I just needed to put it back in the box in which it belonged: that guy’s opinion.

That was my moment even though I didn’t know it at the time.

What was yours?

#LedaWrites

Leda Glyptis is FinTech Futures’ resident thought provocateur – she leads, writes on, lives and breathes transformation and digital disruption.

She is a recovering banker, lapsed academic and long-term resident of the banking ecosystem. She is chief client officer at 10x Future Technologies.

All opinions are her own. You can’t have them – but you are welcome to debate and comment!

Follow Leda on Twitter @LedaGlyptis and LinkedIn.