No Surprises

I understand that as a new employee, my movements are being watched closely as to determine what kind of employee I am.

Am I an honest employee?
Am I a hardworking employee?
Am I a loyal employee?
Am I a trustworthy employee?
Am I an ethical employee?

I'd be surprised if my employer was not testing all the waters to find the answers to these questions. I know if I was in a leadership role, I would be trying to find out what kind of employee I am.

Testing the waters with employees is important, but it's not always the most efficient way to get things done.

Disclaimer ... I love my boss. I think he's kind. He's a wealth of knowledge. He's fair. And he's good at what he does.

Now, with that said, there was a particular incident this week that I found quite frustrating, and it involved a little surprise.

Surprises are usually cool. Typically I REALLY like them. Like at the end of the week when you look at your first paycheck and SURPRISE! There's more money there than you thought. Or you come home after a long day at work and SURPRISE! Your husband cooked dinner. These surprises are usually very happy and exciting.

So, after getting everyone set up with GSuites email we spend the week using it and getting the feelers as to whether or not we were liking it. This was fun for me as I love technology and plus I'd been using gmail for years so it was a walk in the park.

Turns out, office peeps, not so much fans of the gmail-like email and calendaring.

This was cool with me. I can dig that they prefer Microsoft. Many do.

So, as I had discussed with my boss prior to switching to GSuites, I decided it was time to get our Office365 trial rolling. Spent some time getting the DNS servers going and getting us approved as a nonprofit for the big discount. All was going well.

Then I get an email from my boss that was something like.

"Yeah, I kind of figured google wasn't going to work so I purchased a package of 365 a couple weeks ago." 

SURPRISE!

Me ...

For the non techies out there, let me explain my dismay. It takes time to set up a proper DNS hosting server, even if only for a trial. There are many things that need to be done on the backend. Lots of techie wechie stuff. Once this is done with your domain name and login, this trial is then tied to you and not quite so simple to transfer over. So this SURPRISE ... well it wasn't a happy one for me.

I understand the necessity of testing the waters and even sometimes testing your employees, but in this case not being transparent about his plan really cut into my time and created more effort to be applied in the long run.

In the book "How Leaders Create a Culture of Candor," authors, Warren Bennis, Daniel Goleman, and James O'Toole state, ""As a rule, genuine leaders who encourage the honest sharing of information create organizations that have reputations for candor. Able to draw on public good will, such organizations tend to weather scrutiny more easily when things go wrong." 

In this case, my boss was not providing the honest sharing of information by leaving out facts that were very valuable to me in my job. This SURPRISE and lack of transparency will not cost us any loss of data, but it does put our week's worth of emails into two different services creating lost time when we need to go back and reference them. It also created lost time on my part for setting up and preparing the service when it had already been purchased.

Honesty and transparency are important in office communications. Though an employer should have a say in what they are or aren't transparent about, I think it is important to look at all the implications it will have when choosing to leave out key information.

Again, I love my boss. Just in this instance, I don't necessarily approve of the method employed in this situation.

Reference:

Bennis, Warren, Goleman, Daniel, & O'Toole, James. (2008). How Leaders Create a Culture of Candor. Jossey-Bass Books. (p. 20) Retrieved from: http://www.lifeworkleadership.org/Transparency