I am in a very disappointing situation at work and i am dreaming of leaving this place. It is only six month since i joined this company but my life has become hell because of the boss. He is the kind of person who think he is great and start with some stupid meeting everyday about mentoring and impose on us some moral views to attack our personality. He openly told me that i had too much ego because i told him that i was not growing and that the job was not what i was expecting. Since then he always talk about the right attitude, things that everything start with ‘YOU’ etc. He openly criticized me on the fact that i started my chartership and believe that this was not the company goal and considered that i am concentrating on my personal goal too much. My co-workers are convinced that i do have too much of ego. please give me some tips to get out of that situation.

Your story reminds of another story: “Once there a hungry poor man, carelessly lying outside an abandon house. A mann passing through the avenue notices the poor man and thinks that he must be real hungry. So the man buys a sandwich from a store and gives it to the poor man. the poor man thanked him and that man walked away. The very next day the man notice’s the same poor old man lying helpless on the street, the man again gets a sandwich for him and walks away. This starts to happen everyday now. After ten days have passed, the man again passes from the same street, finds the old poor man lying, but this time he does’t have enough money in his pocket to get a sandwich for the poor man. Lowering his head the man trys to pass across the old poor man, as soonas he passes the old man, the old man shouts and says: Where is my sandwich? You were supposed to bring sandwich for me!”

The story is same as yours, when you start accepting everything, the customer thinks that it is his right and customer’s expectations begin to rise, but the day you are not able to meet the customer’s expectations, the trouble starts!”

So its better to say NO and avoid the build-up of false expectations.

Thanks,
Haris

you have a very nice blog and very informative article…

Emotions don’t go away when you suppress them – they become stronger. The best way to reduce frustration is to get it out in the open and do something about it.

As for doing it the customer’s way, I remember one story of an IT consultant who adviced his customer against a specific database solution. They went with that solution anyway, and lo and behold, it didn’t work – for the exact reasons he’d told them.

They call him in to fix the problem and he shows up at the meeting wearing a T-shirt saying “I told you so!” on the back.

Every time he turned to write on the whiteboard, he was not-so-subtly rubbing it in their faces.

But what you did was simply putting your foot down: this won’t ever be finished if they keep making changes.

I work in IT. There are PLENTY of times I tell clients ‘no’. But in the end, if they want it this way or that way and they want to pay me for it, then that’s fine.

‘The client/customer is always right’ is too simplistic. ‘The customer gets what he/she requests so long as he/she pays’ is more apropos.

Will they in the end blame you if the project never gets finished because of the changes they require? Sure, they might. But in the end, it isn’t YOUR project, it is THEIR project that you are working on. You don’t own it, they do.