Me and the whole team were in a session with a business director from the States. What was, up to that point, lively chatter quickly trickled off into silence when he said he wanted to go round the table. He stood there watching us from one face to another, his eyes begging for someone to talk. It was awkward, at least to me. I mean, you know lah, Americans, they are uncomfortable with prolonged silence. Okay, so I thought what better way to break the ice but talk about something that is un-cliche, not the typical how do you think we're doing, how much do you think we're contributing yaddiyaddiyadda.. (Ni la susahnya kalau otak konon dok nak diversify je.. Hehe)
With a light bulb popping out and a pair of lil horns growing out of my head, I thought, wa-hey, here's a channel to give your opinions on your bosses and let the super top management tell them something that we cannot do directly. I mean, day in day out, we've been bitching about our bosses during breakfast, lunch and sometimes dinner. We have been complaining about how the bosses are driving us up the wall, etc. Complains turned to grievances, so I said to myself, alright let's 'talk'.
I was 110% sure that I was speaking on behalf of all of us when I said that we have this pent up frustrations inside, and talking to supervisors doesn't seem like the best idea when you don't even think you can talk and they listen without them being judgemental and/or retaliate later. Bottom line, I was trying to (a) implant the idea *superhero syndrome poyoness* to me and my fellow comrades who groan about their boss/job at 9am in the morning, to go to your boss and provide feedbacks and (b) let them know we're not happy and let's work something out.
Apparently these so-called professionals that I call my colleagues did not understand the concept of round-table and the whole whatever-happens-in-the-room-stays-inside-the-room policy. The minute we stepped out of the room, words sprang out like an air-borne virus (read: strings of octet stream called the short message system) and within seconds, it reached our managers'
I should've stick to that keeping mum and keeping my thoughts to myself thingy, dammit. The nail that sticks out gets hammered down, yes? I sure learnt my lesson about speaking up alright. And I also learnt that, I can be too blunt at times, so I need to brush up on my rhetoric (?) skills.
Last week we had another round table session with the department director. Now, the problem with reverting to silence is that it can lead to feedback that "You're so quiet". Pulak?
Trying to throw a constructive criticism, I tried to bunga-bunga my words. It was too bunga-bunga, I sounded like kaki kipas pulak. Like, euwww sangat.
