That’s Not Winning

Well, that was unexpected. At work, I came across a list of recent award recipients and posted the list of names on our company’s SharePoint-based intranet (like I typically do). The reaction to this list of winners though was not expected. Instead of an overall congratulatory spirit for the winners, there were questions about the visibility and ordering of the names of the winners.

If you’ve used SharePoint’s Summary View for Announcements, you know that it, by default, truncates body entries. I never bothered to find the exact amount of characters displayed before being truncated, but I do know that SharePoint does not indicate that there’s more content to see. So because of this behavior, the list of award winners was truncated in the Summary View, and people took offense of being “omitted. When in fact, if they viewed the entire announcement then they would have seen the complete list of winners. And really, this Summary View has been in place for years. So you would have noticed this truncating behavior well before this one post.

Also, I copied and pasted the list of winners verbatim. I don’t know how the names were ordered nor did I care since really they all won awards, no one better than the next award winner. But I guess that’s not the perception since I asked to alphabetize the list of winners.

As a group of winners from our department, I simply care about who was acknowledged with an award. It doesn’t matter if you’re the first name on the list or the last name on the list. You did well and was duly recogized.

So what’s the underlying message here? Obviously, it’s not about representing our department as a winning team. If being the third name on the list or the tenth name matters then that’s not winning.