A messy thing happened at work. Mistakes and miscommunication turned into a snowball that slowly got bigger. As the consequences became apparent, I could see it might have looked like I was partly to blame – though, I wasn’t. I respect my boss, but they can be deaf to certain complex conversations, so my first instinct was to leave things be.
But the advice from people whose opinion I value – friends, family and experts I listen to or read – all went the same way: you must stick up for yourself, no matter what.
So I second guessed myself and spent a lot of time and energy gathering evidence and building a “defence” of myself. As I expected, when the “news” broke, some colleagues looked my way. I went straight to my boss and, long story short, my hours of preparation were a waste of time.
Is standing your ground, no matter what, worth it on principle alone?
Thanks for your detailed email and generously candid correspondence. What you’ve described to me is a dense and jumbled problem, and we won’t go into the details to avoid risking anyone’s anonymity.
It’s the kind of highly specific case that is tricky to pick apart in a few hundred words. But I do think one thing you brought up is worth digging into a bit further.
Work is rarely like a quiz show; you don’t get rewarded for shouting the first answer that comes into your head.
You mentioned in your question (and in your longer email) that your experience of working with your boss for a long while led you to an instinctive reaction – one that proved correct. If I can summarise your conclusion in perhaps over-simplistic terms, you ultimately realised you should have followed your gut.
I’ll start by saying that I don’t think your friends and family were outrightly wrong. But their blanket, well-intentioned advice didn’t quite work when applied to a tangled, knotty and idiosyncratic situation.
Their protestations might have been persuasive, but my guess is the main reason you were pulled towards their opinion had more to do with a kind of subtle stigma attached to going with your instincts in a professional setting.
So often we frame the world of work, especially corporate work or work conducted for a private business, as hyper-rational. It’s not true to any significant extent, but it’s a pervasive, stubborn and even a seductive story.
And although it often relates to corporate entities and those who run them – the efficient private company, the numbers-oriented founder, the cold truth of the balance sheet – it has a trickle-down effect. In some shape or form, it ends up affecting everyone involved in “the business world”.
So when a person like you, with a lot of experience, a long-term relationship with your boss and every reason to trust your instincts comes across a situation like yours, there’s often a ghostly presence pulling at your sleeve, whispering “Isn’t that the risky option?”
Of course, sometimes, going with your first intuitive thought is dangerous. Or even foolish. Work is rarely like a quiz show; you don’t get rewarded for shouting the first answer that comes into your head before anyone else.
But work is rarely a maths equation, either; what you’ve outlined in our correspondence is not the Bat and Ball Problem*, where the apparently obvious answer is, in fact, objectively wrong.
You knew that your boss would give little thought to any well-evidenced “defence” (as you put it), not because you read some tea leaves or had a vague hunch, but because many, many years of experience had told you this was highly likely. You were guessing, perhaps, but it was an educated guess.
And sometimes an educated guess is the best you can do in an intricate, labyrinthine social situation like a large workplace. Indeed, cognitive science is moving away from the long-held conventional wisdom that logic/reason and intuition/gut feel are polar opposites, and largely separate mental processes.
Again, the advice you received wasn’t inherently bad. Often, sticking up for yourself (and others) at work is critical, especially if the situation works as a kind of test case or creates a precedent.
This is where standing on principle becomes critically important. But that was not ever happening here. It sounds like the sideways glances came, the problem blew over, your reputation wasn’t damaged in the slightest, and you wasted far too much time and effort on a carefully organised explanation that was always going to be disregarded. And none of this was a surprise to you.
If you can apply any generalisation to such a convoluted affair, it’s that sometimes it’s OK – and even rational – to trust your gut.
*A bat and a ball cost $1.10 in total; the bat costs $1.00 more than the ball; how much does the ball cost?
Jonathan Rivett is a writer based in Melbourne. He’s written about workplace culture and careers for more than a decade.
