Learning About Communication and the Workplace: Rant and Self Reflection
When faced with a class that will have a floating number of students, and no set level I asked my boss for some solutions on how to manage the situation. She said she has taught this kind of class and the solution is to plan more than one lesson plan for each two-hour class and to make it fun and light. "You are a teacher. This is easy for you, so just do it. Just be flexible." When I asked for some example activities that could accommodate such a wide range of potentially different classroom dynamics she had no answer. She said different ages, and different levels don't affect the classroom dynamics that much. This made me think she was lying when she said she had taught in this kind of situation. She also told me not to discuss this kind of problem with HR even though that is what HR told me to do. HR tells me to do what makes my branch angry with me, and my branch tells me to do what makes HR's job harder.
If I didn't care about doing a good job I would just screw off and do whatever and make it "light and fun." The reason I want to discuss these things is that clearly what they are doing is not working as an overall strategy, and they need to change something, but they will not change, and that is one reason why I think their branch is failing. I guess my answer to them would be "Just do better marketing and you can get more students. That's your job. Sell your product better. You have been doing that for 15 years. Figure it out. I have been working on the teaching side of things but I know for a fact that you can just be more flexible with marketing and things will work out fine."
I think my conclusion so far is that this particular workplace not only does not want to communicate but because it cannot communicate well avoids communication instead of learning how to communicate better. There are times when I have been told: "When we are not at this branch, or we are not at work, we don't want to communicate with you." "Please don't communicate with us at night or on the weekends" even though because of lack of communication I am doing work for them at night, or on the weekends. This is hypocritical. They are not only poor communicating with staff, but they seem slow to communicate with customers.
Offering a special class to customers the week before it starts on winter vacation long after other companies have probably already sent out their marketing with confirmed dates, and content, and parents have already planned what to do with winter vacation makes little sense to me at all. The early bird gets the worm! Another branch I work at sends its marketing almost a month in advance. The most frustrating thing for me in the situation so far is when they bend the meaning of words like cancel to mean canceled unless we say otherwise at any instant. Imagine you work for a place where you have scheduled vacation and at the last minute, the boss decides that they didn't really mean vacation, they meant work, and that you were wrong for thinking that vacation doesn't mean work. This is the kind of linguistic contortion that children use to get out of doing chores, or homework. This is not how responsible mature adults communicate.
Offering a special class to customers the week before it starts on winter vacation long after other companies have probably already sent out their marketing with confirmed dates, and content, and parents have already planned what to do with winter vacation makes little sense to me at all. The early bird gets the worm! Another branch I work at sends its marketing almost a month in advance. The most frustrating thing for me in the situation so far is when they bend the meaning of words like cancel to mean canceled unless we say otherwise at any instant. Imagine you work for a place where you have scheduled vacation and at the last minute, the boss decides that they didn't really mean vacation, they meant work, and that you were wrong for thinking that vacation doesn't mean work. This is the kind of linguistic contortion that children use to get out of doing chores, or homework. This is not how responsible mature adults communicate.
Immature people tend to blame others I guess. They aren't willing to self critically reflect on how to do better. They are frustrated and shattered when confronted with outside criticism of their situation which is "sensitive", yet sensitive situations need the most critical evaluation to find the root cause of the problem. You don't say "oh this is cancer so I only want one doctor's opinion on how to manage the situation." Especially when that doctor happens to be the doctor who is currently there allowing the cancer to worse. Blame culture in a workplace does nothing to deal with problems. Problems often arise from a number of causes, but if we are only allowed to look at one cause and one solution, and they aren't working there is no way forward.
People have to remember that dealing with problems at work are not personal attacks on the people who work in/around the problem, they are an attack on the problem to help the people. This is what blame culture does not allow, and hierarchical culture especially enables blaming. When roles are so distinct and power structures so unbalanced the scatological snowball rolling downhill reaches terminal velocity much faster.
In light of this post I have taken some time to reflect on how I too have played the blame game, and how I have contributed to a work environment that doesn't encourage communication, and blames others so here are some links I looked at. I really have to refine my communication style, and methods to deal with some of these delicate yet critical situations.
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