Day 306 - More Us Vs. Them

  by  id-iom 

In spite of my expectations that my assignment in Abu Dhabi had everything going for us, both personally and professionally, there were challenges. I experienced my most troublesome supervisory challenge in Abu Dhabi, but I did learn a good lesson from this same employee.

Let me put that lesson into perspective.

Part of the explanation is the military vs. civilian cultural differences and the lack of trust that resulted. When there is so little trust among colleagues, it is easy to slip into the frame of mind that assumes the worst of them. So those who felt they were not getting the service they deserved were quick to complain. If the service they weren't getting was the responsibility of someone who reported to me, I got the complaints. If the service they weren't getting was my responsibility, or if I didn't respond as expected or quickly enough, my boss, the deputy chief of mission, got the complaints. It was an uncomfortable situation many days.

One other factor was that a number of the people assigned in Abu Dhabi were in the business of gathering information from whatever sources could be found, analyzing it, and drawing conclusions from it. It was their job to do so since it wasn't likely that they were going to be able to sit down at a cocktail party and make small talk with those they were interested in learning more about. I understood that. But now and again the information gathered was an overheard statement by an employee in another office and the conclusions drawn were acted on as if they were true. And if there was a complaint rolled into those conclusions, someone would hear about it.

For example, because someone overheard me or someone else talking about the fact that both local employee salaries and American cost of living allowances are paid from the same fund (as were many other items, not just those two), the conclusion jumped to was that I had decided to use that fund to pay for local employee salary raises and not increases in COLA. And that, of course, invoved a complaint. Which went to my boss. Which resulted in a phone call asking me to come to his office to explain myself.

The irony in that example is that if our retail price survey submission resulted in an increase in our COLA, there was nothing I could do to prevent it from being implemented - it was done in Washington even though the money came from our budget. But the embassy had complete control over whether all, some, or none of the local employees' salary increase would be implemented. But I digress.

I got a little tired of being called into the boss' office and confronted with accusations of what others misunderstood. So I took the lesson from that employee with whom I had a challenging relationship to heart and would have liked a few others to learn it as well. That lesson was so simple. He asked me to ask the persons with complaints on the other side of my desk if they had already asked him about the problem. If they hadn't, he asked me not to listen to their complaints, but to send them to him for the discussion. Only if they had already asked him and not gotten a satisfactory answer did he want me to listen to their complaints.

While he was part of us civilians in Abu Dhabi, he had previously been in the army, so he probably understood the military culture better than I. On reflection, there may have been many other lessons I could have learned from him.