What happens when people don't get along or work together

On Wednesday, the LCWS group visited the Supreme Court. But our brief visit, which included looking at the historical setup downstairs and a 15-minute lecture by a curator in the courtroom, hardly compared to seeing the court in action.

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Thursday, at the office, there was an OCO All-staff meeting. Here, the head of the OCO, who is a political appointee, talked with the group about what we had accomplished this year and where we’re looking to go in the coming year. Setting the tone for the meeting, his microphone kept buzzing, creating an annoying noise every few minutes. Initially, I thought this was simply a problem with the equipment, but we found out later that it was a result of interference from his phone as it received messages. At one point, his phone rang –which is how we found out the source of the interference – and he took it out, pushed ignore, and set it on the top of the podium. Then the noise came again. He had not yet figured out that the noise was a product of his phone, but, by this point, he was alone in that. One guy behind me, fairly sternly, raised his voice and said, “It’s because of your phone. Turn your phone off!” So, he set his phone off to the side.

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But back to the content of the meeting. He briefly touched on coming up with a clear, concise message coming from OCO for the coming year because now with a divided government, education is an issue where they can find common ground and get legislation through. But while this message is something that he said OCO would have a part in working on, there was no substantive discussion of what that message would be or desire for input from those in OCO.

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After the meeting, I got to talk with my boss about what we thought of the meeting. I had started with how I thought it was odd that he brought up the notion of coming up with an overarching message but failed to take advantage of the opportunity to discuss it with the group. To this, she responded as though it was obvious that the group would not be the ones to come up with it, the politicos would. We also discussed his mentioning the new employee-evaluation system. He didn’t really know anything, which was unfortunate, because our meeting was an excellent opportunity for our leader to explain to the group the rationale behind the new changes made by the politicos. This could have done something to ease the tension between the numerous political appointees (ED has about 160 for its <5,000 style="mso-spacerun: yes"> But opportunity foregone.

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One last thing asked of OCO was for supervisors to meet with their staff and have a discussion of where each of them see and want their careers to go. This is all well and good, but as I could interpret from the sideways glances by the women in front of me, what good is this going to do when supervisors and staffers alike know that there is nowhere for them to move up? Only one office is hiring and not high-up positions. To me, this seemed to be an attempt to create motivation where there, rightly, is none.