
A clock. Exploiting time constraints is often an effective tactic for those intent on shirking undetected. By letting the clock run out, shirkers can limit the amount of work that comes their way.
To shirk is to avoid carrying out something such as an obligation, a task, or a responsibility. Motivations for shirking vary, but the simplest motives include laziness, fear, and distaste for work. An example of a more complex motive is reluctance to reveal ignorance, incompetence, lack of talent, or lack of a skill needed to accomplish the task. Understanding the motives of shirkers is important, but even more essential is recognizing shirking when it happens.
To shirk unnoticed is the shirker's ultimate goal. Here's a short catalog of tactics of artful shirkers.
- Pretend you're busy
- Looking busy can conceal the shirker's actual activities — surfing the Web, working on personal projects, whatever can be made to look like real work. But most important, shirkers can use fake work to deflect incoming task assignments, by backing their claims that they're "overloaded already." Ironically, pretending to be busy can be exhausting.
- Schedule check meetings too late
- Check meetings are meetings in which we verify that things are proceeding as planned and everyone understands what work is to be done. When shirkers schedule check meetings, they can time them to occur too late for any mid-course corrections. If what they've done is wrong or inadequate, the deadline is then too close to allow for any significant adjustments.
- Request feedback prematurely
- Asking for Understanding the motives of
shirkers is important, but even
more essential is recognizing
shirking when it happensfeedback early in an effort might indicate earnest concern for doing things right. It can also be a ploy intended to elicit words of encouragement that can later be cited as indicating that the level of accomplishment was adequate for the completed task, when the giver of the feedback was only trying to indicate adequate progress to that point. A request for early feedback can also be a trap for those who feel the urge to demonstrate how to do it right, and who thus inadvertently take on significant chunks of both the task and the associated responsibility. - Transfer work to others
- Transferring work to others requires chutzpah, especially if the target of the transfer isn't someone to whom the shirker has the authority to assign tasks. The artful shirker just tells the target to do it, while subtly communicating the idea that the target is expected to take on the task. For example, "I need this by Friday," or "We're counting on you to get this done today."
- Exploit ambiguity
- Requests of the shirker that are ambiguous in the most innocent ways can be disastrous. For example, asking that "a communication go out," might actually be widely and reasonably understood to be a request that a formal email notification be logged and distributed promptly, but the shirker can interpret it broadly enough to mean that a casual conversation or phone call would suffice.
Do you suspect that someone might be shirking? How many items in this catalog can you check off? Top
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Related articles
More articles on Workplace Politics:
When You Think Your Boss Is Incompetent
- After the boss commits even a few enormous blunders, some of us conclude that he or she is just incompetent.
We begin to worry whether our careers are safe, whether the company is safe, or whether to start looking
for another job. Beyond worrying, what else can we do?
Managing Pressure: The Unexpected
- When projects falter, we expect demands for status and explanations. What's puzzling is how often this
happens to projects that aren't in trouble. Here's Part II of a catalog of strategies for managing
pressure.
Reactance and Micromanagement
- When we feel that our freedom at work is threatened, we sometimes experience urges to do what is forbidden,
or to not do what is required. This phenomenon — called reactance — might explain
some of the dynamics of micromanagement.
Fooling Ourselves
- Humans have impressive abilities to convince themselves of things that are false. One explanation for
this behavior is the theory of cognitive dissonance.
Power Affect
- Expressing one's organizational power to others is essential to maintaining it. Expressing power one
does not yet have is just as useful in attaining it.
See also Workplace Politics and Personal, Team, and Organizational Effectiveness for more related articles.
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ion-makers in modern organizations commonly demand briefings in the form of bullet points or a series of series of bullet points. But this form of presentation has limited value for complex decisions. We need something more. We actually need to think. Briefers who combine the bullet-point format with a variety of persuasion techniques can mislead decision-makers, guiding them into making poor decisions. Read more about this program.
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Beware any resource that speaks of "winning" at workplace politics or "defeating" it. You can benefit or not, but there is no score-keeping, and it isn't a game.
- Wikipedia has a nice article with a list of additional resources
- Some public libraries offer collections. Here's an example from Saskatoon.
- Check my own links collection
- LinkedIn's Office Politics discussion group