Surviving corporate
Corporate what?
This is the corporate world. We don't ask questions about HR grammar here!
Guidelines are made to be broken
Do you know the difference between a set of guidelines and a set of rules?
Rules are rules. Guidelines are just guidance. In theory!
In practice a set of guidelines on paper is no substitute for an unpredictable real-world situation handled by a staff member with their own common sense and problem solving ability; meaning guidelines shouldn't be treated like rules.
ALSO in practice, some organisations are regretfully run by lame posers who don't understand the distinction, or the need for it. They penalise their staff for 'breaching' guidelines and so on.
These organisations devalue the problem solving abilities of their own talented staff, by prohibiting them from responding to everyday problems with obvious solutions (unless the solution happened to already have been thought of, in advance, by the big-brain HR person who wrote the list of guidelines).
You can recognise these organisations (sometimes private companies, sometimes they're government departments), because they end up running in a broken kind of way:
- Obvious, unacceptable problems never seem to get fixed,
- they eat up ridiculous amounts of money,
- it takes ages for them to get anything done.
How to rise to the top
So what do you do if you're stuck working in an organisation like that, where everything is so formalised and rigid that it doesn't seem to allow anything to get fixed?
- Fly under the radar
- Break the rules
- Take initiative.
- Fein ignorance when someone tells you you should have gone through a long formal process before you fixed that problem in 5 minutes that nobody else fixed for the last 5 years.
You'll quickly rise to the top. Your higher-ups will notice that you seem to be the only person in the organisation who's getting anything done!
This advice has to be applied cleverly of course, it's not for the faint of heart. If you're not tactful about it you'll get nowhere.