Jimm at the Raging 8th Nerve has posted a blog post that will strike a chord with many of you: Fifth Wheel Sucks. In it, he describes how whenever his workplace has a crisis to resolve, his work team pushes him aside and ignores him. I just had leadership training a couple of weeks ago, and one thing they taught us was that you should include ALL members of a team because you never know which team member might have the key to solving a problem!
How have you dealt with similar situations when you are pushed aside when your work team has an urgent issue to solve? Do you speak up even at risk of delaying the team's finding a solution, or do you stand aside quietly and let the hearing people solve the problem? Do you wait until the crisis is over and then go to the team or team leader, and complain about the fact you were left out during the crisis?
I never worked with teams, deafness prevented that happening, it was always work you could do unsupervised and alone mostly. ‘Teams’ saw you as the ‘weakest link’ and never considered your input, this drove me to seek out work that did not require the team approach, if I saw a job advert that included “Ability to work with a team..”, I’d not apply for it, I’d know I would be left out.
Team work came into existence on my job through a series of changes and upgrades. At first I would be given the simpler and more numerous jobs, and was able to shine when people were absent and I fixed problems in their jobs when sent back by the corporation.
The problem was not the division of jobs, but of being unprepared when an upgrade came in and others were able to get information but I was not included until later.
This caused problems because of the amount of catching up I had to do on my own. It became a survival thing, grabbing onto whatever help, readings, or information that was available and learning by trial and error. This unfortunately became the standard operating procedure.
Looking back, I should have been more anticipating of changes by reading up on and learning software upgrades in staying late and practicing at stations where upgrades were being evaluated before purchase. It takes more effort when one is a deaf IT worker to stay abreast of changes.