Ever wondered what drives your boss nuts? Well, that’s what we discussed with Mary Opperman, the Chief Human Resources Operator at Cornell. A lot of what we’ve talked about seemed like common sense to me and that it should be intuitive. Though I feel like in the workplace maybe it doesn’t seem like common sense to everyone because no one has ever talked to them about how to deal with conflict or how to negotiate. Perhaps this seemed like common sense to me because I came to Cornell as an ILR student, so I’ve taken courses about the topic of human resources. In ILR classes we talk a lot about the workplace and how to foster a comfortable environment for everyone. So, I guess that if you had never really spoken about this with anyone and didn’t have anyone to guide you this wouldn’t seem like common sense.

I feel like there really was one main theme to that event. It was that knowing how to communicate effectively is incredibly important. I feel like in projects a lot of things go wrong because people didn’t understand what they were supposed to do. I don’t think it was because the person is lazy and doesn’t care. It probably has to do with the person just not understanding. Yet, the problem is that people don’t know how to ask for help. For some reason we’re trained to think that asking for help or clarification is a bad thing. Why is it that we think that asking for help makes us look stupid? Is it a societal problem? Or is it just a problem the human race deals with? The interesting thing is that it’s done out of not wanting to look “dumb”. But, the irony of it is that by not asking you do end up looking incompetent to your supervisor because the result isn’t going to be good when your supervisor was under the impression you understood the task.

Learning how to communicate isn’t something we learn once we get in the workplace. I feel like one of the main purposes of school, beyond the academic material, is to socialize us so that we can learn how to work with others, listen, and communicate. For example, in school we learn how to work in teams in group projects. Group projects teach us how to deal with conflict and how to talk to someone who is not holding up their end of the bargain. The situations we face in the workplace may have new details and complexities added to it, but in school we’ve probably been in situations that have taught us how to solve the problem and communicate.