July 31st, 2008
Role reprisal is a very
weird yet damaging occurrence that happens in the workplace, especially
to those in management-style positions.
Role reprisal is a situation
in which people question the value of your role or are unsure of what
exactly it is you do. This leads to the reprisal of support or opinions
of colleagues who could or once favoured you and your efforts.
This occurs to managers
primarily where they have two or three staff under their control. The
manager usually has that person or people doing the majority of their
own work while they sit in their offices doing who-knows-what. The beginning
of role reprisal is when other managers or staff start going to that
one managers' staff instead of to the manager themselves.
They question the value
or worth of going to the one manager when it's clearly apparent that
it's their staff who know or look like they know what they are doing.
Take for example a fairly
seasoned HR manager. This person looks after not just their primary
office but after several others within the region. To compensate for
this, they've hired a couple of assistants from other departments around
the office who wind up doing the fulcrum of the manager's duties, even
while she is present.
What winds up happening
is one of those assistants begins to take on the largest portion of
the work while the other assistants seem to not be doing a
single thing. The assistant office manager makes a comment saying that
they, too, do not realize what the HR manager does if it's her one main
assistant who seems to be doing all the work that she ought to be doing.
The assistant goes out and
talks to the people of the organization. They are active in finding
out exactly what it is the people think could make the business better.
The manager sits in her office holed up and barely comes out to talk.
The people find the assistant more approachable and sheds a strong human
factor amongst those with whom he works.
Another interesting bit
of trivia: the assistant is more qualified than the manager, having
acquired his full certification to be an HR practitioner; she doesn't
even have her initial candidacy.
This, again, leads to internal
role reprisal. The questions regarding actual virtue of her role or
job description and her capacity to handle issues at work, which leads
to a simmering dislike or distrust of that manager entirely.
It's good for the assistant,
but bad on the manager. So why hasn't the manager realized that this
assistant is pretty much stealing the spotlight away from her and not
doing anything to retake it?
Perhaps it's mental distraction.
Perhaps issues at home are causing her to feel distraught, and the assistant's
efforts are allowing her to recollect herself and focus on those issues
at home.
Perhaps she's frustrated
with her career or present circumstances. Perhaps she knows that people
are not pleased with her job, and may even have a hidden grudge against
the one assistant for upstaging her at pretty much everything she does.
Role reprisal can be avoided.
It requires an equal effort on all fronts in order to maintain your
perceived of contributive value for the a) salary you earn, b) impact
you have on improving the professional lives of staff, and c) how you
help progress the goals of the organization.
If none of these are present,
the stronger the role reprisal is. One can allocate tasks to their people;
the empowerment level gives the assistants a strong sense of connectivity
to their jobs and gives them a chance to make decisions based on deep-thinking
platforms.
Thus the reason why they
tend to "outperform" that of the manager. But if the manager
takes their time to contribute as well without looking as though they
are just sitting in their office collecting dust or typing a few emails.
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