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Originally Posted by beafan  ok. i'm venting here but i want to know if anybody else has come by this b4 in hk. cuz i certainly hv never heard of this stuff while in canada
1) u hv to be careful of the ORDER of ppl on your outgoing email list. like the sr. managers have to go first, middle managers go second and so on... has anybody heard of this??? apparently locals ACTUALLY CARE AND LOOK AT THAT
2) u cant submit work earlier than the average. like, if you complete a task and submit it earlier than the average worker, u get back stabbed. WHAT???
3) whoever stays work the latest is the hardest working one. i feel bad if i leave the office at 6pm. and that's after sitting at my desk doing nothing for 30 minutes. my peers normally leave after 7 even 8. are they insane? do they have a life outside of work? why are they so busy? or is it because i appear to be so darn lazy my boss is allocating more work to them (that's fine by me)
if MNCs dont have anything like this in the workplace, i'm switching!! |
Office politics exists in all businesses and organizations in all regions, countries, etc. Whereever there are people, you will find office politics at play.
I have seen this at national levels as well as at the corporate level.
The day before a national congress in a Latin American country where the Canadian Ambassador was to be one of the opening speakers to extend greetings from Canada, our small group supported by a locally well connected person went to meet the Ambassador on the afternoon before the event. We had just sat down when he said he had just been invited to attend a hastily convened competing event where the first lady would be present so he would have to miss the national congress given that the senior person at our conference was a Minister of the government only! This other mini-event was organized by a deputy minister in the same ministry that was the focus of our congress!!! Office politics. This guy apparently felt dealt out of the planning by his Minister - and he was for good reason. The good news was that our contact asked the Ambassador if he could be excused for a few minutes. He left to make a phone call and returned in less than a minute. As the coffee and tea arrived, so did a senior staff member with a fax from the country's President advising him that he was to attend our congress and not the other event! Problem solved but not fully. We were still trying to get the statistics we wanted for the event from one of the government entities but they claimed it was some national celebration and pointed to the soccer field where the staff were playing as the reason we didn't have our stats and this too was earlier in the week of the conference!
In my role as a Vice President of one of Canada's largest insurers I experienced office politics all the time and it was just part of the gig that you had to deal with. When the CEO was gone, the COO and I shared the duties of the CEO. Then the COO got sick and the CEO designation would go to him if he could come in and to me when he wouldn't. I'd be getting calls from the CEO on his 6 week bike trip in Italy to get situations resolved that would require me to work with his other direct reports who were Senior VPs. I'd get things done with them and then the COO would come back in for a day or two and if they reported to him, they'd run to him and he'd relent and change my orders!!! It was a gong show for most of that time. The guy would then be gone again and the CEO would call back and dump on me for not getting stuff done!!! Finally, he realized it was not me but the confusing situation and lack of continuity that was causing things to go undone and he forced the COO to take sick leave and relinquish his acting roles to me.
My point of illustrating two stories is to get across the point that we will all face these situations every day of our working lives. The situations and nuances will differ along with types of organizations and local nuances, but the reality of office politics remains the same.
Banang and others have some very good ideas and thoughts as to how to cope and survive and the first of them is to take toll of the good things that this internship has provided to you as a chance to experience the things the schools don't teach you.
I can see in some of your posts that you have picked up on some of these ideas and you have been more positive.
I have a few friends and business associates from HK and some friends going to univ in Canada from mainland China and more than language separates them. I find that they look at issues very differently and have differing expectations of how they will be treated. It seems from my very small population of mainland Chinese univ students that in internships they expect better treatment and are shocked by office politics whereas the HK university students like it no less, but don't get as upset about it. This is just my experience with small numbers. You remind me of the things I hear from my mainland Chinese friends who are new to Canada but have grade point averages over 4 years in excess of 4.0. Very, very bright students.
When starting a new job, get that meeting with the boss and ask him/her what success looks like over the next 4 months or whatever. Then drop by and ask the boss how you are doing and what else you can contribute. Ask for more challenging work - not by complaining about the work provided but by asking how you can do more to contribute to the department's success and gain more experience. Be proactive.
Whereever you go in a career one thing is clear. You are responsible for the condition you are in. The one thing you can control is your attitude towards the pettiness and the bs you will encounter. Viktor Frankl is one guy who said it best when he said that the one thing that can't be taken from us is our attitude towards things. If we are positive, it will be of benefit.
Or look at it like Confucius:
One does not worry about the fact that other people do not appreciate one. One worries about not appreciating other people.
