Snap Judgements

We have a new member of our team starting on Wednesday. He came into the office last week to sign the formal paperwork, and I had the chance to meet with him. We did a quick tour around our little group, and then had a private chat for about 20 minutes or so. He seems nice enough and appears to know his stuff. Very nervous, which is understandable. He comes to us after having moved from Australia to Stockholm about a year ago. So he's a native English speaker. His Swedish is ok, but basic. To be fair, he's probably better with Swedish than I was when I started. It was very interesting for me to go around with him and introduce him to the other people we work directly with. It was interesting for me this time to observe the interactions as a third person. His situation is almost identical to mine when I started in terms of being a new arrival and not being terribly strong in Swedish. At the time I was so keen to make a good impression that I was focusing on myself. It was only once I had been working for a while that I realised that I was being treated with a certain amount of professional suspicion. That was a shock to my system. It was always unspoken but it was equally obvious that my co workers had doubts about me, based purely on my inability to communicate with them as professional colleagues. It was a terrible thing to feel. All I wanted was a chance, but they had already decided on my value. It has taken me years to finally feel like I'm being treated as a professional equal. That's positive, but I will likely always resent that I had to fight so hard.

Walking around with my new colleague this time, I saw directly the looks of concern and apprehension on the faces of my Swedish colleagues. Don't get me wrong, these are great people who would not intentionally hurt someone. But I could see the question in their minds: "How much use is this guy going to be ?". And. after he had left, that was the theme of the first comments they had for me: "How is it going to be with his Swedish ?". Instead of asking what he could do professionally, that was the very first question. Exactly as I can imagine it must have been about me when I first started.

What upset me the most, was that I realised that I too had exactly the same question about him foremost in my mind. That was really bad that I had let that one factor take a greater importance than all the other factors. This guy is actually qualified at a higher level than most of my team mates. Technically, he's going to be an asset. And that was exactly what we were looking for and we should make sure that we can hold onto him for the long term. Yes, he's not going to be able to talk very well with clients or fellow consultants, but neither could I when I started. That's why I wasn't the point of contact for my first year, another member of our team did the talking. But now that's fixed itself and I work as independantly as everyone else. It's a short term weakness which unfortunately can result in a long term judgement being made early on.

I think that the senior office management are worried that we're going to be speaking English together all the time. We are a Swedish speaking office. It's a fair enough concern, but I would have liked it if they had actually asked me first before panicking. I'm not completely stupid, I think that I am capable of making judgement calls about the most appropriate language to use at any given time. Because we are working directly with each other on a project with a rapidly approaching deadline, I have no problem explaining things to him in English. The focus is first on getting the correct information across. How it's delivered is a secondary issue. That being said, it's been 4 years since I have used technical English, and I struggled a little to explain some of the techincal points to him in English when he was visiting. So I think it's likely to be a blended language when we're discussing work issues in the short term. Outside of the project work, I think he is perfectly aware what Swedish is the language. He tried really hard to speak Swedish to everyone he met during his introduction here, and did a pretty good job of it. I think it was unecessary of the management to even bring that up as an issue. Firstly, it hasn't happened, so there's nothing to base that assessment on. Secondly, give me some professional credit here.

It will all sort itself out but I intend to keep an eye on things. No one watched out for me and I did get it tough from a couple of people. It's an emotional hammerblow to suddenly realise that you're not being viewed as you think you deserve to be viewed. I want to make sure that this doesn't happen again.