… and had to do a makeup last night. It was a Thursday equivalent of my shift, timing-wise, and it was fascinating to see how different it was.

The squad leader clearly enjoyed being a “leader” and bossing people around, giving them detailed instructions of what and how to do it, being a classic micromanager. Himself, he didn’t do any work, and instead kept walking around looking busy, chatting, checking up on things and, well, “leading”.
This is exactly the opposite of my shift (where I am still the leader, after my parental leave ). This is a bloody coop, nobody gets paid for anything, wrapping fancy cheese and weighing spices and nuts is uncomplicated, most people are accomplished professionals in their respective fields and are perfectly trustworthy and capable of figuring out what to do. Plus, there are always more people to do stuff than actual work that needs to be done. Everyone always comments about how fun and relaxing our shift is (and we are pretty productive) – and I just saw the opposite: everyone seemed oddly stressed out. What’s interesting, everyone was weirdly deferential to him, and always stopped to wait for instructions and not do things on their own, and forcefully laughed at his unfunny jokes. Except me, of course, though even I felt pressure to ask him for everything.

Also, I noticed that some jobs were considered “higher prestige”, to be handed out as rewards, and others (like what I and other makeup interlopers were doing) were lower-ranking. This is unlike all jobs being equal at my shift, and people doing simply either what they saw needed doing or what they felt like doing. These rankings seemed arbitrary, though seemed to correlate to what the “leader” considered more desirable ( in the end, he did start doing one of the higher-ranking jobs himself).

Someone should use this coop as a study to see how small organizations can evolve their own “culture”, and how different they can be depending on personalities of different people, all else being equal, and members of the groups drawn at random.

Definitely blacklisting this particular shift for future makeups though.