Hey hoopla... how to handle older colleagues?
Posted by pyeong at 10:39 AM on September 18, 2008.
I am sure any young people starting out to work out there must have encountered this situation before. The situation where either you're suppose to manage this older-than-you colleagues or trying to work with them. THE situation would not appear if you're reporting to them.
I mean what's up with their EGO? Why can't they just leave it at home and be more professional about ... just working? I admit I don't understand how these old geezers feel as I've never had the chance to BE the older colleague yet... so please enlighten me. Personally, I've always maintained that I do not come to work with the main purpose of belittling someone OR to torture someone in the work place purely for my pleasure. Heck I'm not that sadistic and I'm not type of person. I'm being paid to do my job and I'm just going about doing it while waiting for the bell to ring and head home afterwards.
This was a major problem when I was still in the old Semicon industry. I'm quite lucky it is not very apparent here but there are still moments like that around. There is a new guy newly transferred to my region of care at work here and I'm facing it head on now. The guy had a history of being a slow worker and tends to fuck things up so I'm applying the careful method. They had transferred him from the critical Central region to Northern, where he fucked up too and now to the less urgent my Southern region. Just now, I was told that he has already made a complaint to his boss about my team's non-cooperation with him. Hmmm....
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So what do you guys normally do when you're put into this situation?
Some things I picked from my old company, on top of my head now, are:
- Learn their working style and adapt to it. Only after then, slowly push them to your working pace. Immediately starting to push them to our so-called faster working style would only provoke them. This is the usual mistakes that we (the younger generations) usually do.
- Get to know them personally. Most of this older guys are either married or having some sort of personal issues. They have been in the working environment longer than us hence having more of their own things going on other than current work to think about.
- Get their feedback before embarking on a change. These older colleagues have years of experience in the working environment and also maybe in the area where you wanna make the change. They MAY have very good ideas on the change needed or even some improvements to the change you wanna make. Either way, this way of asking for feedback is an un-offical way of you declaring your respect for them and in the long haul will benefit you as they will soon have respect for your way of working.
This is just my opinion on how to handle them based on the limited experiences so far of working with them. My mindset may not be right but I always use the "worst case senario" approach.
Of course things would flow easier, if everyone had the capacity to focus on the job at hand instead of getting personal. Right? :)