Just get the experience and leave!! - Principal Consultant Customer Systems Employee Review

Comments from Steve A Firstly, please see html://www.customersystems.com/employeefeedback Again, some of this duplicates to a degree some criticisms which also appear in either or both of the 2 reviews above and so I will refer you to the replies above rather than repeat. [The more you kiss a, the further you'll go] We are certainly not aiming for an ass-kissing or yes-man culture. On the other hand, turn things on their head and look at it another way. If you refuse to listen and learn and constantly think you know better than the people who run the company, then, in a sense, I admire your boldness and determination, but I wonder whether you are missing an opportunity. Once you rise to a certain level, further layers of technical skill become less relevant and the acquisition of soft skills becomes more important. Some of the very bright, but very technically orientated people we hire struggle with this and resist it, finding it counter-intuitive. My contention is that, if you listen and learn, than you will go further - in work/business generally - but I don't think of that as ass-kissing. I think of it as making the most of an opportunity. However, it does require you to loosen your mind a bit. By the way, when I say "listen and learn" I do not mean to recommend slavishly and uncritically accepting that everything which comes down from more senior people is automatically true. What I mean is being prepared to accept that some of the things that more experienced people tell you may turn out to be right even if they seem counter-intuitive and even if your initial reaction is to reject them. This can involve being prepared to test ideas that you do not immediately have faith in. Now if, instead, you treat all this as a reason to get frustrated and hostile (to me for instance), and then you cast around for some people to share your frustrations with, then before long you will succeed in starting a mutual whining club and it will seem like you have found your forte in life (and perhaps you have). If you are at the senior end and use your seniority to infect some less senior people with the same attitude, then you will have succeeded in stamping your approach and its effect on some other people's careers as well as your own. One of my favourite cartoons is of two caterpillars watching a butterfly soar past them. One says to the other, "You'll never get me up in one of those." [Socialising amongst peers is forbidden] This is a ridiculous assertion and totally untrue. If you are referring to the era and sequence of events I think you are referring to, then the issue was not the socialisation but the fact that a group of consultants who had been in the office for a while (unfortunately because we were short of work at the time) had got into the habit of all taking a leisurely lunch-break together lasting up to 3 times the contracted lunch-break, pretty much every day, and then all naffing off home as fast as they possibly could at the end of the day and then not even necessarily making it into the office on time in the morning. This also involved some more senior consultants leading quite new people into believing that this was the normal and acceptable way to behave in a professional job. It isn't.