Week 7 Tute: Workplace

Week 7, coexisting with colleagues you didn't choose, professionally

12 April 2027

Nobody hands you your workplace neighbours or your project team based on compatibility. You get paid to be there and to get the work done anyway, which is a different, more limited kind of coexistence than the ones you’ve studied so far, but no less real.

Before the session#

Think of a real or plausible workplace situation where you’d be teamed with someone you don’t get along with. Work out what “being a professional about it” would actually require, moment to moment, not the platitude version, the specific behaviours.

In the session#

We test an old line against real cases: a friend of one of your tutors still swears by it, learned from a manager years into a career spent mostly on teams he didn’t pick: it doesn’t matter who gets the credit, as long as the task gets done. Applied honestly, it’s a genuinely useful way to stop wasting energy on turf battles over a shared deliverable. The hard case is telling that apart from the version where someone quietly lets a colleague present their work as their own, three sprints running, and calls objecting to that “not a team player.” Where’s the line? We argue actual cases, not the platitude. We also apply Week 3 and 4’s tools to an open-plan office: who yields the aisle, whose desk becomes the default meeting spot.

Afterwards#

Keep this week’s case in mind for the protocol-design assessment, due in Week 8; workplace teams are a common, and demanding, choice of group.