When you were in high school, were you counting the days until you graduated, when you could enter into an adult world where people didn’t judge you based on what your outfit or who your friends were? I held on to that dream for a while, but I finally let it go because I realized that in a lot of ways work is just like high school.
The cool kids: The senior people of the company are obviously at the top of the social structure; they are the elite who generally don’t talk to those on the lower rungs of the ladder. Like high school your social status in the company is related to who you hang out with. Take administrative assistants as an example: the assistant to the site general manager is very important, she commands respect strictly by association; it’s like she’s got a laminated hall pass and she knows it.
Social life: Who you drink with and how much you drink is the stuff of legends and fodder for years of gossip. Believe me, if you go out and party it up with coworkers, and you make a fool out of yourself all night, everyone will know about it on Monday. You can hold onto the illusion that we’re all adults now, and no one cares about stuff like that, but they do. And there is always someone who needs to be the most important person in the room for the moment it takes to tell everyone about how you were so drunk you took a digger on the curb on your way to the cab. And the story will follow you for years, so be careful.
Fitting in: If you have weird quirks, you’re out. In high school, the quirks might have been talking to yourself, or being a big nerd in class, answering all questions with an eager, hand waving, oh, oh, oh! In corporate America, it’s more acceptable to be the smartest person in the room, but less acceptable to eat tuna sandwiches in your cube or sing at the top of your lungs with your headphones on. It’s social and professional death.
So how do you graduate? Be professional, carry yourself as if you are an important, high status person in the company, even if you aren’t. Treat everyone with equal respect and work to be respected by others. Refuse to get involved in the high school drama. Because when you sit around talking about someone’s weird fashion sense, or who they hang out with, or how they should spell check their emails, then you are contributing to the big bad pep rally that is the gossip mill, and you will be stuck in the high school of the corporate world forever.
