Who are you?
How does your industry represent your strengths, interests, values, and personality? Are you a teacher? A doctor? A lawyer? A policeman? An accountant? A musician? A cook? Do you create safety or risk? Do you elevate others with your work or strengthen yourself?
Do you prefer to work alone or on a team? Are you comfortable with conflict or would you rather have peace? Do you stoke problems or solve them? Or do you start fires so you can put them out?
How is your history reflected in the work you do and the clients you serve?
Classrooms are great workplaces for people who want to usher kids and teens into adulthood. A school is also an apt setting if you are still trying to be popular and get a seat at the cool table in the cafeteria. If competition is the driver, surgeons are created by the desire to achieve, even if it means climbing over the backs of your peers to earn the highest MCAT score and gain acceptance to the most elite medical school. Eventually, these high achievers will be expected to collaborate with the same peers.
Artists of all varieties are fueled by the love of creation, although your audience might not be fans of your work. Business incubators and innovation centers are similarly filled with this talent, even though few of their inventions see the light of day. Attorneys and cops love justice, fairness, and the righting of wrongs. They are willing to live in an adversarial position to achieve their goals. Whatever the occupational direction, our professional paths are expressions of our priorities.
What unresolved baggage have you dragged into the workplace?
While it would be nice to assume that we’re all psychologically healthy, everyone knows that humans have issues, many stemming from childhood. Adults don’t always respond to pressure with adult-level maturity. A useful lens for understanding workplace politics is the notion that it is exactly these unresolved childhood conflicts that come alive under stress.
The need for power or reassurance of adequacy is a prime example. Likewise, people who exploit need people who are willing to be exploited. Most workplaces are stocked with both. What other examples have you experienced? More importantly, from what blind spot might you be operating?
We all have blind spots. No matter how well adjusted you are or how much therapy you’ve purchased, it’s impossible to know yourself fully. It’s easy to attribute ill will to the motives of others. Mirrors rarely tell the unbiased truth. In the politics of the workplace, every teammate has a role and a reason. What would have to be true to make your situation make the most sense?
