You know, being at the top of corporate or government hierarchy in a position with policy responsibility can really fucking suck.
My department has to manage several hundreds (if not thousands) of stakeholders and interest groups from the private sector, other public sector offices, non profits, academics, universities etc. because we develop and manage strategies with wide ranging and long term implications across sectors. Strategies and plans all those aformentioned parties will have/are required to play their part in. Sometimes, or rather almost all the time, some stakeholders are not satisfied about the process, the extent of their involvement and/or direction in which things are moving. In those moments it feels like you've got a bullseye painted on your head while they're all in line to throw either darts or other objects at you. People just
love to complain upwards. On the other end you'll have some stressed the fuck out cabinet minister who when the cameras are turned off will throw shit downward, so to speak.
Of course, most stakeholders are rarely directly insulting when things don't go their way, but they will deliver their feedback in a manner that implicitly tells you that your work sucks, that you're not listening to them, that you suck and fuck you - basically. They may also be directly insulting to junior colleagues when they can get away with it. Anyway, most of it is worded in seemingly professional, passable e-mails, sometimes including your boss / CEO in the cc to 'get the message across' (telltale sign of attempt at escalation/reprimand). I've also seen grown 50 year old men and women behave like ill-tempered children in a meeting.
It doesn't help if the stakeholders in question exhibit some narcissist tendencies - there's a few workaholic tenured professors in the academic stakeholder group who juggle that role with half a dozen other lobbying functions that'll send us emails every once in a while to tell us that X topic is incredibly important and we should immediately get to working on it, see for reference their latest published article on that subject. I imagine if you're following one of their courses the entire reading list will be composed of their own published work.
Anyway, here you are in between all those assholes, always having to act the better person and initiate attempts at conflict resolution or more "stakeholder engagement" to smooth things over. If it gets bad you'll have to confront them on their behaviour which really is much like talking to an ill behaved child. But, in a way that amounts to a respectful tut-tut, so as to not hurt the man or woman-baby's feelings and to avoid embarrassing them.
On a personal level I loathe a good few of them tbh. I also suspect most have horrible personal lives / neglect their families. Wouldn't surprise me.
Last edited by Larssen (2022-09-02 10:22:37)
