“No matter how nice you are to your superiors, you aren’t a
nice person if you treat the help like crap.”
This is what I posted on my facebook page yesterday.
It dealt not with the trip from last week, which was great, but from someone treating one of my
staff poorly. As you can tell from the wording in my post, I don’t
exactly like that. You see, I detest bullies in the workplace, and I’ve
worked very hard to ensure that my staff aren’t bullied. The reason why
is because early in my career in the Foreign Service, I was almost bullied into
quitting.
When I arrived at my first post, I was a 24 year old General
Services officer at a very small mission in South America. My boss was an
FS-03 Management-coned Officer. The DCM was an FS01 Management-coned officer, and the
Ambassador was a Senior Service Management-coned officer. So, lots of people to
learn from. However, the Management officer was what one might call
detail oriented. He and I didn’t (and still don’t) get along at
all. He would berate me in front of my staff, and basically made my life
for the first year there a living hell.
The DCM didn’t do anything to stop it either. In fact,
she would go out of her way to give me even more tasks to do, and then get
angry when she thought I hadn’t done them to her satisfaction. (Didn’t
give me any guidance on how to do the tasks either.) In fact, every time
I saw her after I left that post, she would always greet me with, “Are you
still in the Foreign Service?” I always wanted to answer, “Yes, no thanks
to you!”
Needless to say, I don’t have warm fuzzies about those two
people, and it almost ruined my career. Luckily for me, my next
Management Officer was awesome. She’d come down for a smoke, and we’d
greet each other with, “Good Morning Sisyphus. How’s the rock
going?” “Up the hill as always, Sisyphus.” She helped me learn a
lot about doing my job. I must be doing something right, cause I’m still
here.
The thing is, that during that time period, you could still
get ahead in the Foreign Service by being mean to your underlings. My
DCM later went on to be an Ambassador, and the Management Officer got promoted
to Senior Foreign Service. Luckily that is changing. The Director
General has said that time is over. Belittling someone is no way to get
ahead.
As Management Officer here in Jozi, I made sure when I
arrived that I spoke to every American at post and explained what they could
expect from me and my staff, and what I expected of them. I also told my
staff what I wanted as well. I expected my staff to show up on time, with
the tools they needed to do their job, and to be nice. I told the
Americans that when they requested things that they needed to be as specific as
possible, use the on-line request tool for their requests, and to treat my
staff with respect. If I heard that someone was treating my staff (or
their staff since I’m also the HR rep here) badly I would deal with it. I
don’t take to bullies. Luckily for me, neither does my boss. When
we’ve had issues, he’s backed me up.
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