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Seán Moncrieff: In the modern workplace, how do you know if your boss is mad with you?

When I started in journalism, I received two types of feedback: shouting or no shouting

Workplace disagreements can provoke thunderous fury. It’s just not acceptable to say it out loud any more. Photograph: iStock
Workplace disagreements can provoke thunderous fury. It’s just not acceptable to say it out loud any more. Photograph: iStock

When I started out in journalism, I’d get freelance assignments called news markings. I’d ring up the news editor in the afternoon and ask if there was anything on. Two or three times a week I’d be dispatched to cover a flower show or a residents meeting: usually at the edge of the city. Finglas or Tallaght. The bus rides were interminable. I was 19, and living in a bedsit in Harold’s Cross.

On the bus ride home, I’d write up my copy by hand, and the following morning, use the pay phone in the hallway to ring the news editor who would transfer me to a copytaker. These were always women who (I imagined) would type my words as I read them out with a cigarette clenched between their teeth.

Later on, I’d buy a copy of the Evening Herald to find my story, usually buried deep inside, and never with a byline, to see how what was published differed from what I’d originally written. I never received any feedback on the work. To learn, you had to figure it out yourself.

And on one morning, I rang up as normal, got through to the news editor and told him I had my copy; to which he replied: are you f***ing joking? I can’t remember exactly what words followed, but it was brief and pointed description of my limited mental capacity. He hung up.

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It took me a few hours to understand what I’d done wrong; which only happened when I left the bedsit and saw the headlines: the night before, the Stardust nightclub had burned down with a massive loss of life. There wasn’t room in the paper for a story about a flower show. My lesson was that in future, I should listen to the radio before I attempted to file my copy. And that I should buy a radio.

Afterwards, the news editor (who had a reputation for being a very nice man) never mentioned shouting at me. I felt I had deserved it, and so did he.

I made plenty of other mistakes, and was shouted at by many editors. In those days, when journalism had a more macho tinge, this was accepted as normal. I accepted it as normal. The phrase Impostor Syndrome wasn’t used back then, but certainly I had a sense that I was pretending at competence and was constantly in danger of being found out. Perversely, the yelling was valuable feedback. The less I heard it, the better I was doing.

This memory popped into my head the other day when a friend told me that in the course of a work phone conversation, she’d been shouted at: over an issue so unimportant it barely warranted an adjective, not to mind a raised voice. The exchange had left her a bit shaken. Not in an I-wish-I’d-said-that way, but simply because of the unexpected aggression of it.

In the modern workplace, yelling, even pointed sarcasm, tends to be strenuously avoided for fear of accusations of bullying. Criticism is highly formulated within HR strictures and can often come across as annoyingly passive-aggressive: we care about you; that’s why we’re telling you you’re crap.

But while the language and tone has changed, that doesn’t mean that the feelings beneath them haven’t remained the same. Workplace disagreements, or just the guy at the next desk who tends to be a bit irritating, can provoke thunderous fury. It’s just not acceptable to say it out loud any more.

And it doesn’t seem to matter what your work is. As the academic Charles Philip Issawi once said, politics in universities are bitter because the stakes are so low. You could be a van driver at a paper clip factory or a senior government minister and inevitably, you’ll form close alliances and vicious enmities; which will in turn influence the decisions you make. We’re really not as grown-up as we pretend.