Compromise

Some six years ago, I was on a team interviewing a candidate for a position at the high tech company where I work. Our "team" interviewing really consists of a series of 1:1 interviews, after which the exhausted candidate is sent on their way, and the team gets together to determine whether s/he passed muster.

The candidate was exquisitely skilled, with both the academic background and experience to make her attractive to the group. Oh - and she was a she - which in our male-dominated environment looks good for those diversity stats. I threw all sorts of questions at her, and she did marvelously. So then, ten minutes or so left in my hour, I threw the time open for her questions. Did she have any?

"Is it true that you have to take a class about arguments here?" Um... well, yes. I discussed the course with the interviewee, who looked rather perplexed, paranoid, and ... well, panicked.

Turns out that she'd asked all of us that question, and in our team session at the end of the day, we decided against making an offer. Didn't matter, because when we emerged from the room, she'd already called and left a message - not interested.

There's something about the corporate culture, about our ways of dealing with disputes, that just works for me. The first part of this week was just a bloody unpleasant mess. By yesterday, I'd managed to unpack enough of what was going on in my cranium to figure out what was up - the rest of the world hasn't taken that class. There's a concept called constructive confrontation - not quite what our corporate culture has engendered, but a variant thereof - which, when used with skill, can get to good resolutions of previously-intractable conflicts. It's a good practice, and although I'd be the first to say the company's not practicing it all that well these days, compared to unstructured conflict, it's not bad at all.

So - why 'compromise'? Well - what do you do when there's a conflict, and not everyone agrees on how it should be resolved? Well - you escalate - or you walk away. This week, I opted for the latter, but I'm still vaguely unsettled. I'm not sure it was the right thing to do. I don't know what the alternative would've been, though.

No real conclusion. I'm tired. It's been a long week. I'm feeling tremendously grateful for my job right now, and curiously, not primarily because of the bits they drop in my credit union account twice a month.