We have to deal with other people in some way when we’re doing our jobs. Whether that’s customers, co-workers, or management we have to deal with people. This can be through electronic means or it can be through direct interaction.
We also have to deal with our environment. This can be our office, a job site, a store, or anywhere else we will be working. So today we’re going to be looking at dealing with our team and our environment.
The examples from today come from a game called Rainbow 6: Siege. The game is basically two groups of five competing for opposite goals. One side wants to secure an area, object, or individual while the other side wants to prevent this. Victory is achieved by eliminating the other group or getting control of the objective and keeping control.
It is a really fun game if you’re into semi-realistic first person shooters and a perfect microcosm of a team environment. There are all these little details that can lead to victory, from the control of information to how patient someone can be to how well they apply the abilities of the operators they have selected.
We’ll start off today’s examples with team work or team politics. Specifically the proper interactions of a team.
I had recently played a match with one of my long time gaming friends. We were playing a few casual games and we encountered a truly toxic team mate. Casual games are plagued with these individuals, and this was my first experience with a toxic team mate.
I’ve heard stories of them, watched videos, but it is really different to encounter them first hand. Now this individual wasn’t just being toxic in chat. I can take smack talk, and generally ignore it. But this individual was sabotaging our chances of success with his actions.
My friend and I were trying to secure the objective we were defending. I generally play a trap operator, so I was placing my traps in a way that would confound the enemy. The toxic player started to destroy all my traps. This of course raised some red flags, but nothing serious, more of an inconvenience.
The real trouble started when he team-killed my friend and ask “Does that help you?” with a smile in his voice. Obviously this individual was trying to cause us to lose. He didn’t care about the success of the team in the slightest. He was to have his fun at our expense.
I ended up team killing him to avoid him sabotaging us at a critical moment. We then kicked him from the group. We will sometimes encounter people who will sabotage our team for their own ends. It doesn’t matter what ends those are. But we need to remove these individuals as quickly as we can.
Which brings us to the next topic: our environment. We need to control our environment to an extent. In Siege this equates to securing the objectives by reinforcing walls, setting up traps, putting barricades, and using the cameras to your advantage.
If we don’t control the environment we can have extreme negative outcomes. For example, I was playing against a team that didn’t reinforce their objective and I was playing a class that has a special charge that fires grenades through non reinforced or hard walls. I decided to risk it and use a few charges near the objective. The first killed one of the enemy team and the second damaged one of the remaining members.
They were obviously not expecting this and they didn’t take the possibility into account. We need a level of control in our workplace. The reason being is that if we can control more of the factors available to us that leaves us more resources to deal with unexpected problems, etc. The less we have control over in our work environment the more we are at the mercy of others.
We’ll be rushing around trying to compensate for something that we could have preemptively taken care of. There are somethings that are absolutely out of our control. That means we need to determine what is within our control and work it to our advantage.
What can you control? What can you not? What should you be controlling but are currently not?
Think about it.
Sincerely,
The Irreverent Gentleman
gentlemansuniversityofmanliness 