A Rambly Look at the Post-Black Friday, Pre-Christmas Situation

I'm still trying to fight my way out of the mists of the Black Friday season. Things are fine again in terms of workload, but as I was complaining to Mama and the siblings today, it still feels a bit like my self-confidence was doused in gasoline and set on fire.

Even as the team is heartwarmingly kind and friendly and hardworking as ever, I feel like I have messed everything up as a team leader. And whenever I feel like (on top of things I actually feel guilty for) I'm being blamed for additional things that are neither my fault nor my responsibility, then I do feel like it's my responsibility to bring other people to a point where they feel willing and able and eager to tackle these problems.

Besides I've been doing a ton of 'meddling' lately. The impression dawns that these things are often something that should be done by the HR team instead. It's also an unfair world: Some good intentions and a little work mixed with a boatload of tact gain far more gratitude and goodwill than a boatload of good intentions and tons of work mixed with little tact. And I don't want to get more credit for the former than other colleagues get for the latter.

It often feels like having tact is like a sneaky superpower. But I think simple rules do great good even if one doesn't intuit why they're needed. (Whereas intuition hasn't been a problem for me lately: the tendencies toward empathizing with others have become creepily intense to the point that I need to check that I'm not overstepping.) For example: There's nothing people love more than having most of the work prepared whenever they're asked to implement a new idea, and then they can just add finishing touches and leap ahead. (Besides, I think that the best proof that I genuinely believe in an idea is that I'm willing to try it myself; and I like the principle that Papa cited that one should never ask e.g. employees to do what one isn't able and willing to do.) So that's what I try. But instead, a lot of colleagues have great ideas and then dump the work needed to put them into practice onto the person who is benefited by them — unaware that this is likely going to tick off the beneficiary, no matter how pure and helpful the intention is. The beneficiary is quietly working along and then they're being 'helped' by being given more work; the natural instinct is to think indignantly, 'What?!'

It often worries me that a situation where people could easily get along, turns into a butting of heads. And sometimes observing workplace interactions is like watching a collision between two cars in slow motion...

***

I've already complained about this to my mother, but I haven't been sleeping well lately and don't know why. Except if there are stressors in the workplace that I am not taking seriously enough. At university in Vancouver, I used to listen to Mozart's piano concertos 19 and 21 every evening once I was going to sleep. If I had trouble sleeping, I'd be awake enough to hear the third movement of the 21st, but there was maybe only one time I consciously heard the whole CD. So, in the hopes that it would have a Pavlovian effect, I found Mitsuko Uchida's recording of No. 19 on YouTube. I hadn't quite reckoned with the noisy YouTube ads, but apart from that it seems to have helped and I was actually asleep before 2 a.m. (Then woke up again when it was still night... but my facial skin looked quite healthy in video conferences later next day, and narcissism being as potent as it is, that was good enough for me.)

Originally I listened to Rudolf Serkin's version with Eugène Ormandy conducting, but I like Clara Haskil's Mozart recordings, too.