"Works Well With Others"
A friend lamented to me about how in the real world, we work with anal superiors who rather than appreciate our hard work for the firm, choose to have contact with us only through the phrase, "Where is that work I asked you to do?" This is also on my mind because recently, I received my mid-year review where it was noted that despite an ability to get work done and deliver what I promise, I often 1) try to figure out too much by myself and don't ask for help early on enough, and 2) don't communicate enough with others about my progress in projects, therein making them nervous.
This reminded me of senior year in college and my first steps into the world of labor-just-for-pay. This was a foreign concept to me so the whole thing was kind of a farce, best encapsulated in my cover letter writing experience. I remember trying to list and discuss my skills (or more accurately, the skills I read in other people's resumes since I couldn't think of any skills that I had). Among my few skills, of course, was the ridiculously generic "works well with others". Even then, I thought this was dumb. I mean, if you are a remotely nice person who can empathize with other people, then it follows that you work well with others. As a college student, I thought the ability to work well with others was based on how nice you were, how empathetic and open-minded. My instincts told me that I had this "skill". I'd lived in a vastly different country, been an immigrant on welfare, travelled, met the upper echelons of America at Harvard, and taught refugee kids in Dorchester. In short, I've been around and seen many different ways to live and to look at life, and reflected on the contradictions therein. I know better than most people what it means to be open-minded. I can get along and work well with others.
In the work world, I now understand this idea differently. The world of the university encourages self-discovery and reflection. You feast on the possibility of your own personhood. If you see something new, try it, incorporate it into yourself. Then share that experience with someone and build a community through that sharing. In this world, how well you "get along" with others directly spawns from how much you can see them in yourself - you are curious about their interests, moved by their deftness with a violin, they connect to your immigrant story as their past, your urges as their creative energy. Everyone gravitates towards some similarity, superficial or primeval. The guy next door (at least in my idealistic vision) is trying to do the same thing. We each try to become more of ourselves, to absorb more of the world into us. The two progressions are one and the same, inseparable. That is our labor.
The work world has a very different basis and hence operates differently. In this world, the labor setting is structured such that everyone is specialized and segregated from each other through both hierarchy and duty. Here, the ability to "work well with others" is not so much grounded in absorbing different experiences into yourself and therein being self-sufficient. In fact, it is the opposite. It's the recognition of how non-self-sufficient you are, of how much you must rely on other people to literally get anything done. Take a macro example - If you want to successfully persuade bond issuers to give you underwriting business, you must rely on the syndicate desk for market color and investor relations. You cannot do that part. You are decidedly not of that part and so you do not know it intimately, but you must get results from it. What you do is holler to the guy on the other side, "What do you know about this? Can you help me out?" Because he is the expert in that field and you are not. So in this strict division of labor, "works well with others" doesn't come from your empathetic and encompassing worldview. It is not an indeterminate urge towards reflection, but a very concrete ability to put in a phone call and satisfy the guy three cubes away. The real world is so big and made of so many pieces, so you are constantly at the boundary of your knowledge. At these boundaries, you need to communicate ignorance. Knowledge as you know it ends and for the job to complete, communications takes over. Now I understand "works wells with others" in a different way. It may not be as deep or metaphysical as a curiosity to absorb the world, but it is, in fact, a skill.
Hence, it is helpful to communicate your status with others even though you yourself know that status quite well.
Somehow, I also understand this as a process of growing up. When you are young, you assume that the world is centered on you. Your communication style focuses on your needs - you cry when you're hungry, you ask questions when you're curious. But as an adult, you have to become better at grasping the situation as someone else would see it. Communications can no longer driven only by what you know or don't know, it also has to be dictated by what others know or don't know. With your own eyes, you have to see various social situations decentralize away from you. Things becomes less internal and subjective, and the world becomes possible entirely outside yourself. Of course, how much of this I enjoy or support is a more complex story.
I "grew up" in college a Marxist, but more and more, I see the world operating as a Durkheimian modernity.
This reminded me of senior year in college and my first steps into the world of labor-just-for-pay. This was a foreign concept to me so the whole thing was kind of a farce, best encapsulated in my cover letter writing experience. I remember trying to list and discuss my skills (or more accurately, the skills I read in other people's resumes since I couldn't think of any skills that I had). Among my few skills, of course, was the ridiculously generic "works well with others". Even then, I thought this was dumb. I mean, if you are a remotely nice person who can empathize with other people, then it follows that you work well with others. As a college student, I thought the ability to work well with others was based on how nice you were, how empathetic and open-minded. My instincts told me that I had this "skill". I'd lived in a vastly different country, been an immigrant on welfare, travelled, met the upper echelons of America at Harvard, and taught refugee kids in Dorchester. In short, I've been around and seen many different ways to live and to look at life, and reflected on the contradictions therein. I know better than most people what it means to be open-minded. I can get along and work well with others.
In the work world, I now understand this idea differently. The world of the university encourages self-discovery and reflection. You feast on the possibility of your own personhood. If you see something new, try it, incorporate it into yourself. Then share that experience with someone and build a community through that sharing. In this world, how well you "get along" with others directly spawns from how much you can see them in yourself - you are curious about their interests, moved by their deftness with a violin, they connect to your immigrant story as their past, your urges as their creative energy. Everyone gravitates towards some similarity, superficial or primeval. The guy next door (at least in my idealistic vision) is trying to do the same thing. We each try to become more of ourselves, to absorb more of the world into us. The two progressions are one and the same, inseparable. That is our labor.
The work world has a very different basis and hence operates differently. In this world, the labor setting is structured such that everyone is specialized and segregated from each other through both hierarchy and duty. Here, the ability to "work well with others" is not so much grounded in absorbing different experiences into yourself and therein being self-sufficient. In fact, it is the opposite. It's the recognition of how non-self-sufficient you are, of how much you must rely on other people to literally get anything done. Take a macro example - If you want to successfully persuade bond issuers to give you underwriting business, you must rely on the syndicate desk for market color and investor relations. You cannot do that part. You are decidedly not of that part and so you do not know it intimately, but you must get results from it. What you do is holler to the guy on the other side, "What do you know about this? Can you help me out?" Because he is the expert in that field and you are not. So in this strict division of labor, "works well with others" doesn't come from your empathetic and encompassing worldview. It is not an indeterminate urge towards reflection, but a very concrete ability to put in a phone call and satisfy the guy three cubes away. The real world is so big and made of so many pieces, so you are constantly at the boundary of your knowledge. At these boundaries, you need to communicate ignorance. Knowledge as you know it ends and for the job to complete, communications takes over. Now I understand "works wells with others" in a different way. It may not be as deep or metaphysical as a curiosity to absorb the world, but it is, in fact, a skill.
Hence, it is helpful to communicate your status with others even though you yourself know that status quite well.
Somehow, I also understand this as a process of growing up. When you are young, you assume that the world is centered on you. Your communication style focuses on your needs - you cry when you're hungry, you ask questions when you're curious. But as an adult, you have to become better at grasping the situation as someone else would see it. Communications can no longer driven only by what you know or don't know, it also has to be dictated by what others know or don't know. With your own eyes, you have to see various social situations decentralize away from you. Things becomes less internal and subjective, and the world becomes possible entirely outside yourself. Of course, how much of this I enjoy or support is a more complex story.
I "grew up" in college a Marxist, but more and more, I see the world operating as a Durkheimian modernity.
posted by Quang Tran at 3:33 PM
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