Throwing Your Weight Around

The office is a competitive place.  I have recently been catching up on Mad Men and I am sometimes amazed at how cutthroat the office environment was.  I am thankful that I have worked at companies where advancement was based more on merit than on whose ass you were able to kiss.  I am a strong believer in personal accountability, so I have frequently found myself fighting against office politics.

My company likes to say that we all work really hard to get the job done, and that we function as a really tight-knit team.  I agree, we all do work an exceptional amount to get the job done, but it's still every man for himself. Even in an environment where one client deliverable will have no less than five people handle it, no one works together.  Why is this?  Why does everyone have to try and mark their territory, and why are they doing this at the sake of efficiency?

Take for example, a recent dialog I was engaged in.  While working on a project for a client, we were informed that we needed them to send us a file.  We could not progress any further on our project without this file.  The client had also stopped responding to us.  It was mentioned to me that we may have the file (or a version of it) internally.  When I inquired about this, I was met with a lot of resistance.  I was told that our version may be just different enough to cause problems.  I acknowledged that I understood the risk and wished to move ahead anyway.

Keeping in mind that our work had come to a complete standstill, why would the project manager interject that using an incorrect version of the file may cause delays in the timeline?  Why did the PM fail to read the entire conversation and decide to piss all over everything just for the sake of saying something, anything?  Had the PM read the entire email string and understood the situation, we could all be working on a resolution to the issue instead of arguing over a work-delay now or later.  If we all chose to stop playing petty politics, this issue could already be resolved.  Instead, we have one very large roadblock being created by the project manager - the person who is supposed to prevent or navigate around roadblocks.