Every office has them: drama queens and drama kings whose highly theatrical soliloquies about their trials and tribulations suggest that they believe, as Shakespeare wrote, “all the office’s a stage.”
Well, maybe Shakespeare didn’t put it exactly like that, but Cynthia J. Young made the same point in a recent article in Forbes, “How to Protect Your Career from Workplace Drama.”
It’s natural for tension to bubble up in an office where people are forced to work together in tight quarters. Even in loose quarters, where remote team members are united by Zoom but separated by miles, conflict can cause catastrophic irritations, if not mutually assured destruction.Just the time spent bickering is enough to sink any project and damage any career. According to Forbes, “a majority of employees deal with office disputes at an average time of 2.8 hours a week.” And that calculation doesn’t include the hours spent complaining about all the complaining to family and friends (and strangers).
If you’re new to the working world, conflicts are especially harmful. As Young writes, “you want to focus on doing great work, learning and building your career, not getting dragged into office drama or participating in gossip, especially mean-spirited, harmful gossip.” (Of course, if you’re already well-established in your career, you don’t care about doing great work; you just want to be left alone.)
People being who they are and work being what it is, you’ll need an exit plan when finding yourself in a front-row seat to a long-running workplace drama. Here are four solid suggestions from Young with a smattering of extremely flimsy comments from me.
No. 1: Focus On What You Can Control.
Your chances of resolving the problems of your co-workers are slim, unless you’re a trained psychologist or a Wiccan. Instead of trying to be the office peacemaker, concentrate on what you do best: kissing up to management and doing as little work as possible without getting caught.
No. 2: Avoid Getting Pulled into Drama.
Considering your natural charisma and movie-star good looks, it wouldn’t be surprising if two battling team members pick you to resolve their grievances. To extract yourself from the situation, find the similarities in the combatants’ positions and harmonize them. Better yet, find the differences and magnify them. If you can make two co-workers self-destruct, that’s twice the chances you have for promotion.
No. 3: Find Small Moments of Joy.
Balance the negativity that surrounds you with teeny, tiny moments of joy.
Admiring your paycheck definitely won’t bring any joy, but pilfering office supplies is always rewarding, especially when you can go home after work and roll around in a bathtub full of purloined paper clips and robbed rubber bands.
Putting a whoopee cushion on the boss’s chair before the weekly status meeting always produces joy, especially if you can blame it on someone else.
No. 4: Communicate With Your Boss.
The price of admission to most workplace pity parties is a promise that you will never bring anything discussed to upper management. Feel free to make this promise but feel freer to break it.
When bringing confidential matters to your manager, do not name specific individuals. Instead, use anonymous descriptors, like “that big idiot in marketing with the initials ‘JW’ torpedoes all our good ideas” or “we’ll never finish this project on schedule if that numbnuts in sales with a bad comb-over who sits by the coffee room keeps coming in late and leaving early.”
If your traitorous activity becomes revealed, you’ll be denied access to the juiciest office gossip, which is a benefit in itself. You’ll be known across the company as a tattletale, but you’ll be a tattletale with a job.
By refusing to waste time in destructive loops of negativity in the office, you will be able to fully focus on your work and your career. Or you can use the extra time to spread rumors about your co-workers and share stories of the heartbreaking and totally fascinating challenges in your life.
If no one at work wants to hear about your hard times, tell me. I can’t promise I’ll respond, or offer solutions or even listen, but it’s better than spilling your guts to someone who can hurt you at work.
You’ll feel better and I’ll feel better, too. The worse off you are in your job, the better I’ll feel about my job. You don’t think I have problems? Pull up a chair and I’ll tell you all about it.
Bob Goldman was an advertising executive at a Fortune 500 company. He offers a virtual shoulder to cry on at bob@bgplanning.com.
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