I was surprised by the thing I heard when I first arrived: YOU SHOULD HAVE CANADIAN EXPERIENCE. There are dozens of government sponsored programs that give you that experience in the form of UNPAID internship. You slave for 12 weeks with a local company that pays you nothing to get that experience and someone who is much less educated and qualified than you gets paid for it. Meanwhile, you have to pay your bills, rent, transportation etc. BUT you are getting that experience. There are lots of people I know who came here looking for Canadian experience who could not afford to be a slave to gain that experience and no one would give them a job. 'Your English is great BUT you don't have a Canadian experience'......Where the hell are people supposed to get it if NO ONE wants to give them a job?!
I was lucky that I got my first Canadian experience which was decently paid. It lasted only 7 weeks but I decided to keep volunteering with the organization later although with a different department.
Anyway, apparently the culture of an organization totally depends on the culture of its leadership. The culture I encountered was totally different from the one I expected. A lot of micromanagement was going on. There is a hierarchy of relationship and a closed door policy. It was a mini communist state with high level of bureaucracy in the best traditions of Mao Zedong. Obedience, silence, following unwritten 'protocol' that you are not aware of and that wasn't communicated to me when I came to work, constant spying, checking your desktop to see what you are up to, holy cow, I had never seen such an organizational culture in my lifetime, and I come from a very traditional hierarchical society. The boss desperately wanted to control everyone, the obsession with numbers not quality of service to satisfy the top management was crazy! The staff consisted of the 2 predominant ethnic groups in the world, and this was a bunch of 'yes'men. It was suffocating to just be there. My immediate manager (although there were so many of those who wanted to be my immediate managers, I didn't know exactly what the organizational structure looked like) walked to my door, looked into the room and walked back to her room. Sometimes, the top manager would run into my room look around as if searching for something and ran out. Then I was told that I have to follow the protocol, which is written in the air and have to be cautious when I go to another workplace.
I inadvertently created some problems for middle management because of my outspokenness. I had a chance to participate in a diversity training led by some dude from Ottawa. The guy who has never read jackshit about culture and diversity, never completed a single course on the topic was giving a session to a bunch of HR managers. The guy was so rude that if I were in the place of those managers, I would have just left. Canadians are polite people, even if you are wrong they might not tell you that you are wrong. This dude was plain insulting, he didn't even want to introduce me and my colleague to the audience. It was only after one of the HR managers asked him to introduce us, he unwillingly asked us to introduce ourselves.
The whole workshop was bullshit from the beginning. I didn't stay till the end because I had to go to an interview. But I made the dude uncomfortable. It was a lecture to start with and it promised to turn into a disaster. I then interfered. Having completed my thesis in Culture, I remember the theory and could make the conversation on culture much livelier. The dude couldn't answer a simple question of what a Canadian culture is. He said there wasn't such a thing as a Canadian culture. Bull....! OF COURSE THERE IS! I interfered at this point and started talking about what culture is in general and how cultures differ from each other. Dr. Bryant's efforts paid off. I remembered Hofstede and his good old theory of culture and the people were interested at least. The presenter was infuriated. He couldn't say a sentence without me interjecting something after it. I did it on purpose. I can't take other people's crap and I am convinced that if you are paid you MUST do a good job. His arrogance, insistence on things that he was saying wrong and that was clear to others, rudeness and stupidity I just couldn't take. He later told my colleague who was a moderator how much he enjoyed my presence in the workshop. Later he complained to the boss that I ruined the workshop for him by interfering with it. My immediate manager got reprimanded for NOT following the invisible protocol.
Such organizational culture is definitely not mine. I cannot believe it is a Canadian culture either. I wish Canada was a melting pot like America and imposed its own culture on newcomers.
Most of the people I met were from the same cultural background as the middle and senior management and didn't have much say in what was going on. Most of them would slit your throat to keep their jobs.
I was surprised when I saw that at my farewell party today only one person who I have been working for only a week said nice things about me. Well, I didn't do much work before this last week because I was constantly excluded from work. They wouldn't let me do what the other staff were doing. I was supposed to be glued to my chair and keep silent. Because the organization had extra funding that they had to spend in order to apply for more funding next year, they hired me and my colleague. As a result, we were excluded as staff members and were mere furniture there. I wouldn't have minded that if they had allowed me to communicate at least. I feel so bad that because my social nature some colleagues of mine were told off. I befriended a nice girl who had worked for Child Welfare Services before. I absolutely enjoyed talking to her and listening to her stories. After all, it was a learning experience for me, I was expected to learn as much as I could and I tried. So we would spend lunch time together talking about the job she had done. Well, someone didn't like that and she got told off. We stopped talking altogether. I totally understand the girl, her practicum depends on this organization, she paid for it not to be reprimanded by General Mao, who is a complete failure at giving feedback and is on a fault finding mission all the time. I personally didn't have any encounters with him but I knew he was a control freak and demanded complete obedience. I couldn't care less though. I am not a yes man and if I have to stand up for myself, I can do that better than anyone.
But I enjoyed the last week of my work working with a different manager, who was Irish and definitely knew how to manage others, not control them. She made the last week such a pleasurable experience for me that I loved working with her. Wish more people were like her.
Well, I found it hard to work with immigrants tho. But I made very good friends and I can say that overall I learned more about diverse populations in Calgary. Good or bad, it was an experience! My CANADIAN experience......whatever that is............
I was lucky that I got my first Canadian experience which was decently paid. It lasted only 7 weeks but I decided to keep volunteering with the organization later although with a different department.
Anyway, apparently the culture of an organization totally depends on the culture of its leadership. The culture I encountered was totally different from the one I expected. A lot of micromanagement was going on. There is a hierarchy of relationship and a closed door policy. It was a mini communist state with high level of bureaucracy in the best traditions of Mao Zedong. Obedience, silence, following unwritten 'protocol' that you are not aware of and that wasn't communicated to me when I came to work, constant spying, checking your desktop to see what you are up to, holy cow, I had never seen such an organizational culture in my lifetime, and I come from a very traditional hierarchical society. The boss desperately wanted to control everyone, the obsession with numbers not quality of service to satisfy the top management was crazy! The staff consisted of the 2 predominant ethnic groups in the world, and this was a bunch of 'yes'men. It was suffocating to just be there. My immediate manager (although there were so many of those who wanted to be my immediate managers, I didn't know exactly what the organizational structure looked like) walked to my door, looked into the room and walked back to her room. Sometimes, the top manager would run into my room look around as if searching for something and ran out. Then I was told that I have to follow the protocol, which is written in the air and have to be cautious when I go to another workplace.
I inadvertently created some problems for middle management because of my outspokenness. I had a chance to participate in a diversity training led by some dude from Ottawa. The guy who has never read jackshit about culture and diversity, never completed a single course on the topic was giving a session to a bunch of HR managers. The guy was so rude that if I were in the place of those managers, I would have just left. Canadians are polite people, even if you are wrong they might not tell you that you are wrong. This dude was plain insulting, he didn't even want to introduce me and my colleague to the audience. It was only after one of the HR managers asked him to introduce us, he unwillingly asked us to introduce ourselves.
The whole workshop was bullshit from the beginning. I didn't stay till the end because I had to go to an interview. But I made the dude uncomfortable. It was a lecture to start with and it promised to turn into a disaster. I then interfered. Having completed my thesis in Culture, I remember the theory and could make the conversation on culture much livelier. The dude couldn't answer a simple question of what a Canadian culture is. He said there wasn't such a thing as a Canadian culture. Bull....! OF COURSE THERE IS! I interfered at this point and started talking about what culture is in general and how cultures differ from each other. Dr. Bryant's efforts paid off. I remembered Hofstede and his good old theory of culture and the people were interested at least. The presenter was infuriated. He couldn't say a sentence without me interjecting something after it. I did it on purpose. I can't take other people's crap and I am convinced that if you are paid you MUST do a good job. His arrogance, insistence on things that he was saying wrong and that was clear to others, rudeness and stupidity I just couldn't take. He later told my colleague who was a moderator how much he enjoyed my presence in the workshop. Later he complained to the boss that I ruined the workshop for him by interfering with it. My immediate manager got reprimanded for NOT following the invisible protocol.
Such organizational culture is definitely not mine. I cannot believe it is a Canadian culture either. I wish Canada was a melting pot like America and imposed its own culture on newcomers.
Most of the people I met were from the same cultural background as the middle and senior management and didn't have much say in what was going on. Most of them would slit your throat to keep their jobs.
I was surprised when I saw that at my farewell party today only one person who I have been working for only a week said nice things about me. Well, I didn't do much work before this last week because I was constantly excluded from work. They wouldn't let me do what the other staff were doing. I was supposed to be glued to my chair and keep silent. Because the organization had extra funding that they had to spend in order to apply for more funding next year, they hired me and my colleague. As a result, we were excluded as staff members and were mere furniture there. I wouldn't have minded that if they had allowed me to communicate at least. I feel so bad that because my social nature some colleagues of mine were told off. I befriended a nice girl who had worked for Child Welfare Services before. I absolutely enjoyed talking to her and listening to her stories. After all, it was a learning experience for me, I was expected to learn as much as I could and I tried. So we would spend lunch time together talking about the job she had done. Well, someone didn't like that and she got told off. We stopped talking altogether. I totally understand the girl, her practicum depends on this organization, she paid for it not to be reprimanded by General Mao, who is a complete failure at giving feedback and is on a fault finding mission all the time. I personally didn't have any encounters with him but I knew he was a control freak and demanded complete obedience. I couldn't care less though. I am not a yes man and if I have to stand up for myself, I can do that better than anyone.
But I enjoyed the last week of my work working with a different manager, who was Irish and definitely knew how to manage others, not control them. She made the last week such a pleasurable experience for me that I loved working with her. Wish more people were like her.
Well, I found it hard to work with immigrants tho. But I made very good friends and I can say that overall I learned more about diverse populations in Calgary. Good or bad, it was an experience! My CANADIAN experience......whatever that is............
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