"It also helps to pick your battles, not the ones you hold near and dear, but the ones you can win, and be nice about it. Once you have a reputation as a gracious winner, you'll have an easier go."
My boss recently said (when I had the technical answer but other factors were not favorable to overturn a situation), "Do you really want to die on that hill?" Which is to say, choose your battles strategically and not based on the involvement you personally have in a matter.
So the thick skin thing is all relative. What bothers you more: when people listen to you and choose something else, or people who make it clear from the beginning what their intention is? I'd rather know early so that I can state my case and let it go. The choice to circle back and pursue it again should not be made often. There aren't many hills where the certainty of success and criticality make for a hill worth taking.
My past two companies I have worked for A holes. I refused to believe that this is how work is and i must accept people like this. So I resigned and moved on. I have learnt a great deal in my short career, 7 years, but one thing for sure i can tell you. DO NOT SETTLE for less than what you want in life.
I now report to an excellent boss, and the work is bringing out the best in me. So many guys along the way just accept their employment conditions and dread every day of their working life.
I now have built a thick skin, can deal with self abosrbed A holes, and know exactly how to put them in their place.
"What bothers you more: when people listen to you and choose something else, or people who make it clear from the beginning what their intention is?"
People who listen to me and choose something else don't bother me at all. I'm not of the opinion that I am God, people are free to have different solutions or opinions if they wish. It's nice to be asked for my input, but I'm surely not offended if people do things differently, even if they're wrong in the end.
On the other hand, if people make it clear at the beginning what their intention is, I don't see the point of giving my input, it's just wasted effort.
You should realize that to some of the employees at your workplace, YOU are the a$$hole. If you buck the general consensus and voice a dissenting opinion, it may not matter to them that you can back it up with data and facts; to stand alone from the rest of the crowd is an affront because you are sending them the message that they are wrong. Be sure to voice your opinion clearly and succinctly. Then walk away. If they consider what you said before they make their decision, great. If not, then they should be the ones who have to clean up the mess they make. In the end it's all just a matter of perspective. You don't need to force your opinions down anyone's throat. Simply let them make their own decisions (whether right or wrong) after voicing your opinion. If you are able to do this your life will become less stressful, and your skin surprisingly thick.
The bad behavior that you often see, like the shouting amtches that many have described in this forum, result from personal insecurity. Pity these people. Do not emulate them.
The person who signs your paycheck is your boss. Everyone else is a secondary customer. If you want thick skin, work as a restaurant line cook or short order cook for a year or two. Everything else is a calm and laid back profession by comparison, except maybe an ER nurse.
Life is short, and as others have said, pick your battles. Very little in life is actually worth getting upset about. If you have toxic people in your organization, sabotage them. Carfeully. Seriously, do what you can to get them out, or get yourself out if the whole organization is infected. It's not worth it to stay in a cancerous environment because you will eventually become like them just to survive.
If you are the toxic person, you probably don't even realize it. But if you do, do what you can to change and learn to get along with people to get the job done with a minimum of drama.
My 2 cents.
It is better to have enough ideas for some of them to be wrong, than to be always right by having no ideas at all.
Another quote I have always liked: I do need a job; I don't necessarily need this one!
Life's to short to suffer endlessly at work. Gotta remember - money and fun. If you are not receiving both, you might think about going elsewhere. I think it's personality. I'm in oil & gas; it can happen anywhere.
Amen beej67. It's amazing how much better you feel when you're not being ripped off, or held at gunpoint by a job. I personally need to own my job rather than being owned by it. That requires some deliberate choices in relation to how you choose to live, particularly related to how you spend your money.
I'd way rather work with people who are passionate about what they do than people who go through the motions just to be nice. It's inevitable that there will be friction between passionate people who differ about how to do the right thing, or about what the right thing is. It needs to be managed properly so that it doesn't get out of hand and to ensure that everybody remains focused on getting the right thing as an end result. But if that is in place, that creative tension and friction can be very stimulating.
As far as "where you develop thick skin.." ..you used to develop it in college. Engineering programs across the country were known for being very tough, forcing you to go to great lengths to keep up, and then sometimes screwing you anyway, so you'd get used to the sorts of events in the corporate world that would drive a graduate of an easy college to quit. In the prior century, college taught not only material, but also thickened your skin.
Nowadays, with the invention of the US News and World Report ranking system, colleges have largely stopped thickening their students skin, opting instead simply to focus on the material. The reason is that USNWR gives colleges higher rankings for student retention and higher rankings for higher GPA. So the best university on the block would drop down to the 15s if their average GPAs were in the 2s and retention was only in the 70s. So everyone's giving a lot more As and Bs now, to compete. Basically, colleges were punished by the independent third party ranking system for thickening their students' skin.
I have mixed feelings about the modern changes in college grading and mindset. On the one hand, I think I benefited professionally from the "skin-thickening" I acquired in undergrad. On the other, I'm not sure the benefit outweighed the overall pain-in-the-ass I endured as an undergrad, and in some ways I'm happy for modern students that their struggles are more reasonable.
Hydrology, Drainage Analysis, Flood Studies, and Complex Stormwater Litigation for Atlanta and the South East -
I'm a very young engineer and I work for a very small company where people are pretty honest with each other. From the responses I read, I find it alarming that the general attitude is "putting up with your bosses", "deal with the A hole"... The ultimate picture is, how do I survive this cruel treatment at work. From what I see here, everyone expects to have bosses and co-workers that give them a hard time. Why should that be the norm?
Since when work becomes dealing with your co-workers and bosses instead of actually producing and make the world turn?
Since I'm young, I want to make a mark from what I do. People playing politics with me are wastes of my time. I walk away from them as needed. You'll say we need that job. we do, but there are more jobs out there, just not many that fit your criteria. We are also afraid of change, so we "thicken our skin" to plow through, as if we are building courage to endure hardship. However, if fact, it is a move of a coward who's afraid to make a change (change of job perhaps? change people's attitudes? Put people in their place so they respect you?)
Take an active role instead of "thicken your skin" so you can endure. Life aren't worth living suffering like that.
Olidin, I applaud your idealistic attitude. You will soon find that not all people are on that level of thinking. You inadvertantly identified the class of person against which a thick skin is required, the coward.
There are numerous people in the workforce, greater than 50% I daresay, from my own experience, that are afraid of change (therefore, growth and improvement) and must do what they can to cement their position in the firm. If one is not growing and improving, but must still retain their own good standing, then what is the only course of action? They must tear down and sabotage others. Sounds cynical, but give it a few years and you'll see exactly that.
Meanwhile, don't lose your professional attitude, cover yourself, make sure your work and your successes are well documented (so that you get credit for them)and just be aware that "smiling faces sometimes tell lies", to borrow from an old song.
It is better to have enough ideas for some of them to be wrong, than to be always right by having no ideas at all.
"Your mileage may vary" applies here. There are those that have NEVER been laid off; there are those that have been unemployed for years. Likewise, there are those that have had excellent managers and those that have the a-holes. This is no different that the fact that there are engineers that come here that are extraordinarily talented engineers, and there are those who I want to identify so that I will never have them do ANY engineering.
Given the spectrum of engineers here, one can quite readily imagine a similar distribution for any other category of people, including managers.
TTFN
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