Playing 'the game' at work

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On a more serious note, you can only go so far without playing the game in your career. You can be amazing but efforts go unnoticed if you're not showing the right people. Unfortunately this means that some more mediocre people succeed where talented people don't. You don't need to brown nose 24/7, but if you're not at the top of the tree you have to work to other peoples'/company agenda and objectives. Sadly my training has become a lot about jumping through hoops and filling in online forms. It's less who you know, more how well you play the game. Whether you think that's good or not is up to you!
 
I've seen this at every level from when I left school and starting working as a loader to running my own depot.

Its not what you know, its who you know, or in most cases play golf with, and in other cases, sleep with.

I've seen really exceptional hard working people get shafted out of promotions, pay rises, and even their jobs because they just don't think to suck up.

God help you if you choose to voice an opinion as well, never mind the fact that history is littered with the corpses of generals and ruins of companies who ploughed on regardless of what their subordinates were telling them, you'll be gone, just like that!
 
I was never any good at "the game". It takes a lot to make me panic or get stressed. Whenever there was a major outage because I wasn't seen running around shouting or picking up the phone and calling people (who wouldn't have been any help) it seemed like I wasn't bothered. I was busy fixing the problem.

I don't think I can go back in to a permanent job now. I don't have to try and please people for that promotion, pay rise or bonus. Or leave it up to others to decide what skills I need to learn and which direction my career should take.
 
I think too many people in here think playing the game = sucking up. Personally, I wouldn't associate the two at all. I imagine most (good) managers would look down on you for sucking up, it's not very dignified and I'm sure they'd notice it.

However, it is VERY much who you know, not what you know. For example - I did some work in our head office in London about a year and a half ago, just got my head down and got on with it as best I could. Made friends in the team, went for drinks, all the usual things you'd do. Then last week I find out there's an opportunity going in the head office, and my name was put forward by that very team. I did no sucking up whatsoever, I was just friendly and hard working, got along with people.

So if anything, it's not your fault for not playing "the game", it's your managers fault for being crap at their job by not taking notice of hard workers.
 
Another thing I noticed is how often supervisor to middle-management level tend to be the more useless workers when they were in lower positions than the people they manage. My theory is because it's so hard to sack people, it's easier to promote them to a non-management/supervisor role.

In the last big corporation I worked for we all worked in teams of 8-12 people and all the teams were under the department manager (who sat in the same open plan office as all of us). Now we didn't really need 'team managers' as well (in reality they were supervisors) but they were there and in every team is was always the least productive, least knowledgeable team member.

And it makes sense in a way, if someone is very productive and good at what they do, why promote them to 'manager' level and lose that productivity? It's kind of similar to the "those that can do, those that can't teach" logic.
 
I actually thought you meant THE GAME.

As in the game

I just lost the game too now :( I had it going for like 2 years.
 
Smigly said:
I actually thought you meant THE GAME.

As in the game
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k46ro0.png
 
estebanrey said:
Another thing I noticed is how often supervisor to middle-management level tend to be the more useless workers when they were in lower positions than the people they manage. My theory is because it's so hard to sack people, it's easier to promote them to a non-management/supervisor role.

In the last big corporation I worked for we all worked in teams of 8-12 people and all the teams were under the department manager (who sat in the same open plan office as all of us). Now we didn't really need 'team managers' as well (in reality they were supervisors) but they were there and in every team is was always the least productive, least knowledgeable team member.

And it makes sense in a way, if someone is very productive and good at what they do, why promote them to 'manager' level and lose that productivity? It's kind of similar to the "those that can do, those that can't teach" logic.
Click to expand...

Indeed why promote someone whose good at getting down and doing the hardwork.
 
I love it when managers set actions and you change nothing then suddenly you've met those actions... Box ticking via inaction for the win.

On the comical side one of the women i work with who i have the hots for came over to my desk today for help and nicked one of my trebors! Without thinking i turned to her and said with a cheeky grin "you only ever come to my desk when you want something to suck on".... Only to then pan round a bit furtger to see the ceo of my employer stood there grinning lol... Followed by my manager having a semi banterous word in my ear about being mindful of who is in hearing range.

Dodged a bullet today lol
 
estebanrey said:
Another thing I noticed is how often supervisor to middle-management level tend to be the more useless workers when they were in lower positions than the people they manage. My theory is because it's so hard to sack people, it's easier to promote them to a non-management/supervisor role.

In the last big corporation I worked for we all worked in teams of 8-12 people and all the teams were under the department manager (who sat in the same open plan office as all of us). Now we didn't really need 'team managers' as well (in reality they were supervisors) but they were there and in every team is was always the least productive, least knowledgeable team member.

And it makes sense in a way, if someone is very productive and good at what they do, why promote them to 'manager' level and lose that productivity? It's kind of similar to the "those that can do, those that can't teach" logic.
Click to expand...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Principle
 
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