Tomorrow is St. Valentine's Day and although I never celebrate it, I have to say that it still resonates with me today. I've just got back from a very exhausting work-related two-day meeting, in which our extremely dysfunctional work group was forced to sit down and talk about the problems we face.

Formed in a culture of strong leaders, our group has now been without such a leader for a few years, which has lead to people coming and going, rumours, imbalances and "decisions" taken by a small group behind the backs of co-workers to reach often rather egotistical goals (promotion, platforms to push their own agendas et cetera). It has been very difficult to address these issues, primarily because nothing has been out in the open. All of us have felt what was going on, but few of us had real evidence. Another reason has been that the leader we now have is very new and has not realised what has been happening.

When this meeting was announced, many of us seemed to realise that this might be our chance to do something about it, and there were several of us who approached our leader trying to explain as well as we could what our situation was like. Of course we did not know what it would result in, but today when everything came out in the open and the attitude of the small group (that they, according to them, were the only ones who were "fit" to decide on strategies for all of us, and that the rest of us were irrelevant in the process) became evident, our leader made it clear that transparency and openness was to become top priority from now on. As of now, we are going to have monthly information meetings for everyone and additional strategy meetings for those who are permanently employed (something which doubles the number of people thinking about strategic decisions). I'm hoping for some change now. I'm still not sure whether I would like to stay here, but at least this is a step in the right direction for our group. I really don't like wheeling and dealing, and I definitely try to stay away from people who are attempting to use me and others for their own purposes. It creates a culture I simply don't want to be a part of. Let's hope this is a first step towards a work situation where people actually care about and are happy for each other.

Image found at Cardiophile.com.