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The Bad Person
At my company, unlike the legions of others who are afraid of what they might discover, we have a web-based portal that enables anyone to post questions to management. Fittingly, the answers to most of the questions get publicly posted along with the questions themselves from someone in the management group. Again, unlike the legions of companies littering the landscape who’s upper management layers don’t “get involved” with such trivia from the DICforce, my company’s questions are often answered by our CEO.
As you might surmise, some of the submitted questions could be judged as hurtful and hostile by many, if not the majority, of people in the organization. Nevertheless, everyone has a different threshold of “inappropriateness“, and as you might guess, mine is pretty high.
Because:
- of my high personal inappropriateness threshold,
- I like to continuously skirt the edge of inappropriateness to feel alive and perhaps influence other people’s thinking,
- I think (but am not sure) that quite a few people have at least judged me to be perpetually disrespectful,
I often get asked “Did you submit this question?” regarding some potentially controversial submittals. The interesting thing is, I’ve only been asked that by fellow DICs, and never by anyone in the management group. Is that both cool and weird, or what?
Every time I get asked the “Did you submit this question?” question by a fellow DICster, a slight twinge of guilt courses through my being even though I didn’t ask the question and even though I have judged it “appropriate” according to my subjective inappropriateness threshold setting. I suspect that I experience the discomfort because I feel like the asker is searching for “the bad person” who would ask such a thing. When that happens, the following quotes pop into my head to help me move past the icky and uncomfortable feeling associated with dancing on the edge of the abyss:
“It is only by risking our persons from one hour to another that we live at all.” – William James
“Do one thing everyday that scares you.” – Baz Luhrmann
How about you? Are you always on the hunt for “bad people“? Do you like to skirt the edge of inappropriateness? Do you like to sit in the lazy boy, munch on popcorn, watch the show, and remain on the sideline?
Inappropriate
It seems that the word “inappropriate” is in fashion these days. It’s the modern and eloquent replacement for old and tired words like “disrespectful”, “disloyal”, “blasphemy”, “heresy”, and “sacrilege”. Infallible judgers are always on the lookout for impactful, fear-inducing words like these to silence conscientious objectors and concerned citizens. As you might surmise, the word “inappropriate” is directed at me quit frequently :).
Based on my personal experience, I can tell you that the fear effect works, but it’s success is person-specific. In my case, the fear effect usually wears off quickly and I’m back at being “inappropriate” yet again.
In dysfunctional CCHs, one of the primary functions of HR departments is to police the behavior of the DICforce. Thus, since they’ve been “approved” by the corpocracy to inject fear into non-conformers and rabble rousers, they’re the final arbiter of what’s deemed “inappropriate”. When someone “reports” (a.k.a rats out) someone to HR, the group happily kicks into action to assess the allegation. Unlike the drawn out investigation that occurs when a DIC rats out another DIC, the verdict of “inappropriate” is always certain when a manager rats on a DIC. You see, since HR is an integral member of the management guild and it gets paid by its brethren, it does whatever is best for management – which may not be best for the company as a whole.
Since (as I’ve said several times before) I like to make things up, don’t believe a word I say. If I could, I’d change the name of this blog to “Don’t Read This Blog Because I Like To Make Things Up“.
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