Embarrassing people

A bashful guy goes into a bar and sees a beautiful woman sitting at the bar. She’s alone and gorgeous. Gathering enough courage and strength, debating with himself, he finally convinced himself that he would make a move. He stood up, but then because of his extreme shyness; he sat down again. He is profoundly contemplating whether he would make another move or not.

After an hour of gathering up his courage, he finally goes over to her and asks, tentatively, “Uhm, would you mind if I chatted with you for a while?” She responds by yelling, at the top of her lungs, “No, I won’t sleep with you tonight!” Everyone in the bar is now staring at them.

Shocked, horrified, and petrified, the shy guy is hopelessly and completely embarrassed, and he slid back to his table. Needless to say, all eyes were on him in that place.

After a few minutes, the woman walks over to him and apologizes. She smiles at him and says, “I’m sorry if I embarrassed you. You see, I’m a graduate student in psychology, and I’m studying how people respond to embarrassing situations.” This is simply a project of mine, and I hope you won’t take it personally. It’s just research and work to me.

At this point, the shy guy suddenly transformed himself into a vicious person. You could see the change happening as you look into his eyes. Standing up from his table, he put both his arms on top of it and then yelled at the top of his lungs, “What do you mean FIVE THOUSAND PESOS? No way, and you’re too expensive.” The shy guy had his revenge after all.

A lot of people I know cares too much for their work and projects that they lack the sensitivity of caring for people in the process. How many times have I come across incidents wherein a young, idealistic but overly ambitious new chap from a top-notch university would make waves, rock the boat, step on toes and embarrass senior workers with their unbelievable arrogance because they think that climbing up the proverbial ladder of success requires the employment of such tactics? Embarrassing people and humiliating them is not a good strategy for personal advancement.

I also knew a lady who made it her career to make everybody look bad in the workplace. She regularly did so that she would look good in front of the management. Reports were filed criticizing the (quote-unquote) inefficiencies of senior officers. Bad mouthing people, backbiting and namedropping were regular ingredients in her work repertoire. Well, these were her tools for the trade.

But people like her cannot last long in any given place. Pretty soon she was public enemy number one. She never had anybody else sit beside her in the company canteen. Everybody avoided her like the plague.

The next thing I knew was that she was booted out of the company as well. For whatever reasons up to this day, I still do not know. But the one thing that I realize is that this is such a high price to pay for progress. To be remembered as a bad guy in the workplace.

Life is too short. There are many things that we can do to help people and build them up and doing so adds value to our name and reputation. We cultivate friendship, and where there is harmony in the workplace, there’s a higher chance of doing and achieving more significant things. Good leadership involves encouraging, inspiring and building up people not embarassing and humiliating them.

(Francis Kong’s Level Up Leadership last run for the year will take place on Sept. 10-11 at Makati Diamond Residences (near Greenbelt 1). Register early as seats tend to run out early. For advanced registration specifically for group rates or other inquiries contact April at +63928559-1798 or register online at www.levelupleadership.ph)