Graduate Development Programs

Graduate Challenges: Fitting In & Avoiding the Office Gossip

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The biggest immediate challenge you will face in the graduate program is to gain acceptance from your departmental colleagues; the solution to which some are tempted to believe is to get others to like them. Being liked is a good start, but it won’t get you anywhere on its own.

Simply being “the new guy” is a barrier in itself, regardless of whether you actually provide reason for resistance from existing members of the team. Before you can overcome these barriers, you must first understand the environment that you are about to encounter.

Commercial organisations are competitive by their very nature. Competition with other companies is fierce, but it pales into comparison with internal rivalries that are conducted on a day-to-day basis. They are fierce and often become highly personal.

Companies are organised hierarchies that broadly resemble a pyramid structure (fewer positions at the top!), which means staff must compete with one another for the next promotion. Depending on the function of the department, a team can have anywhere from 3 to 30 or more members. Imagine a game of musical chairs with only one chair for a typical team of 8 people!

Let’s take this team of 8 and assume 3 of them are shooting for that next promotion, whenever that is likely to be available. A further 3 are relatively new, so they’re out of the running and the other two are somewhere in between for reasons ranging from relative inexperience to lack of motivation to progress.

This informal hierarchy has been formed over time through the various stages of group dynamics i.e. “forming, storming and norming”. If you have ever watched the reality TV series Big Brother (go on admit it!), you will be quite familiar with these 3 stages of group formation:

Forming: the tentative initial interactions the housemates have with one another in the first few days i.e. forming.

Storming: often heated clashes in which housemates attempt to define social boundaries and role

Norming: relative harmony once the social hierarchy and acceptable boundaries have been informally agreed on.

Inevitably “intruders” or house guests are introduced to mix things up a little once behavioural norms have been established.

The “intruder” always has the same predictable result in unsettling some housemates, striking rapport with others and then there are those housemates who are not particularly bothered. As a graduate, you are the intruder.

You have been introduced by the organisational Big Brother equivalent, your CEO, to shake things up a little, provide some competitive tension and to raise the overall standard of talent in the organisation.

Meeting the objectives of the CEO does not necessarily serve you well in achieving your immediate aims, remembering that most intruders on reality television are the first to be evicted. Very few survive for long.

Social hierarchies are difficult to break into and will resist disruption because its members have already invested much energy in establishing it. They have fought for a spot in the hierarchy and its structure is a function of the people within it. Your inclusion represents a disruption to this structure.

Disruption = change = uncertainty = resistance = giving you a hard time.

Not everybody wants to be a shooting star; this much is true and even truer at work. However, there is no shortage of people who think they deserve more and almost nobody thinks they are getting too much. So before you seek to conquer the world, conquer your cubicle (not the toilet variety!) and work your way from there.

Like the Big Brother intruder, you too will encounter 3 different attitudes to graduates in your organisation:

-    Resistance
-    Support
-    Indifference

Assuming you are reasonably personable, your colleagues will use the following framework in order to reach their conclusions about you:

Are you a threat to their prospects or social status?
The answers to this question are heavily weighted towards producing resistance. If you do present a threat to your colleagues, you are almost certain it will produce an attitude of resistance towards you. On the other hand, if they are not threatened by you, the most likely outcome is indifference. Not threatening someone is not going to make them accept you, though it certainly leaves the door open for that possibility.

Are you useful to them?
Unlike the previous question, this is weighted in favour of producing support. Being useful to someone is very likely to produce acceptance, though a lack of utility is unlikely to result in resistance.

Note that these are in order of importance to your colleagues. Very few people will accept anyone who presents a threat to their prospects regardless of how useful they may be, which is why it is most important to make this issue a priority.

As for being liked, my opinion is that you shouldn’t compromise your values to appease others. Everybody has a different interpersonal style and if you take the time to address the issue of personal significance in your interactions with your colleagues, then most people will be OK with that. Simply make the effort and take a sincere interest in people. Anything more will have you walking on eggshells, hoping you don’t offend people.

In the next few posts, we will go into the details of these attitudes towards you and how you should go about addressing them, ensuring you make a smooth transition and fit into your team as easily as possible.

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