Watershed: Leadership and Real Culture Shock Essay

OLCU 615
March 24, 2014

Watershed

Situation Description

At my current organization, it's the perfect representation of a corporate world. The family-like atmosphere presence is minimal and the politics are evident. Coming in from a non-profit organization where the work environment was filled with love and hardworking professionals working together for a good cause, my new job was extremely eye opening and a real culture shock. When I started, my manager was fairly new. She was very quiet and didn't have much knowledge on the day-to-day activities she was in charge of managing. It was very frustrating when I would ask her a question and she would tell me " I'm not sure" and never get back to me with the answer. Or she would tell me the wrong answer and not have my back when the wrong answer screwed up the work -flow. Later I learned that my manager was the very first manager to make it into a leadership role without having had and prior management experience or did not go through the “Leadership development program", which was designed to train seasoned employees on leadership roles. After doing some through research I learned it was because her husband was a VP in the same company but in a different line of business. Her husband’s father was the president in the same line of business my boss worked in. Because of this, people despised her. They would talk very bad about her and start up petitions to get rid of her. I was frustrated with her for similar reasons but not to the point that I wanted to get rid of her. As time went on and I made friends with everyone, I realized that my dislike for her had grown. Every single time we would all get together outside of work, my boss would be the target of a bashing session. The more and more I became involved with everyone the more, my disdain for my boss and job became of toxic to me to the point of depression. After finding myself in the mode of depression, I realized it was time for a change.
Disengagement
My weeks begin passing me by like the seconds on a clock. I was no longer working towards a career, rather just working. I looked forwards to Fridays and dreaded Sundays. After a trip to the doctors and being told my blood pressure was too high... I made the decision to “no longer care so much". My boss continued to not know the answers and be praised for taking my answers, or even others, but I wasn't going to let that bother me because I was in the transition of no longer caring.
"It seems to be a universal belief among traditional peoples that at times of inner transition people need to be seperated from their familiar places in social order (Bridges pg 110) ", and so I realized I needed a changed. I began removing myself from the little cliques that formed to make their whole work life around the idea that they would make my bosses life miserable. I was done. Just like that, cold turkey.

Dismantling
" Getting unplugged from you old place in the interpersonal and social world that gave [me] an identity is where [my] transitions process started (Bridges pg 113)". As I became withdrawn from the toxic circle of drama, I began to realize the drama was now coming at me. I no longer wanted to be a part of something that was literally making me physically sick and not adding quality to my life or career. What was the point? The people who I considered friends, then withdrew themselves from me, they didn’t appreciate the fact that I no longer wanted to crusade with them in a secret war against my boss. I was no longer in the circle, I was just as much as an outcast as my manager was, only making significantly less and not having any direction on what my next move was within the company. The cost of pulling away from the drama came at the expense of me becoming the target of the drama.

Disidentification "In breaking [my] old connections to the worls and taking apart the internal structures required by those connections, [I ] also lost my old

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Watershed: Leadership and Real Culture Shock Essay

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