How to Stay Sane When Things Go Crazy at Work

How to Stay Sane When Things Go Crazy at Work

Imagine you are a marketing officer planning an advertising campaign for a coffee product. Your boss gives you a deadline of one week rather than one month to take advantage of the surge in instant coffee sales. Three days in, you find that your total expenses are massively over the budget, your celebrity endorser Piolo Pascual suddenly flies out of the country for a Hollywood audition, and your marketing team are threatening to tear each other's hair out.

How do you fix this situation and complete your award-winning coffee commercial? But more importantly, how do you resist the urge to scream your lungs out and hurl office furniture everywhere?


The answer, of course, is workplace diplomacy. More specifically, you have to find a way to band your team together and work towards the end goal of executing a successful advertising campaign.

Let's take a cue from the interpersonal dynamics between a drill sergeant and his privates-in-training. The drill sergeant will use a variety of motivational tactics during training, the most common being the get-in-your-face-and-scream-really-loud technique. The intended effect is to get the privates to band together against a common enemy, in this case the drill sergeant.

In our imaginary scenario, the work-related pressures are the drill sergeant, and you and your coworkers are the privates. Your task is to get your coworkers to realize that you are all fighting this common enemy, and that you can lean on each other to overcome it. Once that happens, you will not only have completed your goal, but you will also have developed a stronger relationship with your coworkers.

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