The rise of the CDO — Chief Drama Officer

Yet another effect of the pandemic.

The Chief Drama Officer is someone who has realised that is easier to “exists” in a constant and artificially created condition of urgency, complexity and, indeed, Drama.

The Drama is the perfect environment where the CDO can “have a say” and has a purpose.

Despite it’s obnoxiousness, the Chief Drama Officer is a quasi-necessary figure whose involuntary task is to exasperate various situations so that some wise people can carefully “sieve” the noise in order to find the real problems and try to fix them.

Beatification is a suitable reward for those people.

10 distinctive traits of a CDO

Following a list of distinctive traits that can help you to spot the CDO in your organisation .

1. The CDO it is a ghost position, in an organisation it could be a boss, a manager, a worker, it can be hidden at any level of an organisation. We can become one too, from time to time.
2. There is no task that can be done quietly and well in 20 minutes that a CDO can’t do just as good in 2 hours and hassling no less than 2 people.
3. The CDO main concern is to look socially impeccable and it can’t refrain him/herself from publicly informing the world how hard is he/she working, juggling with the adversities.
4. About 30 minutes before the end of the working day the CDO can finally take a breath from managing world class problems and starts to work at his/her best. Of course, he/she can’t go home because has too much to do and, of course, he/she makes a point in keeping you aware of that, every single day.
5. The CDO main weapon is the email. There is probably a special version of email clients specifically made for CDO that prevent them to hit [Enter] while writing: an email to say “done” becomes a no less than 1000 characters in one single paragraph. Highlights, bold, oversized and colored text is not unusual but the CDO knows that it can improve the reading experience and minimise the hassling effect so, he/she uses it as a last resort.
6. The CDO use the email like a direct messaging app and get nervous if doesn’t get a reply in 2–3 minutes. The CDO sends you an email (always life or death situation), then sends you a DM to tell you that you have an email to read, then calls you to tell that you have a DM that tells that you have an urgent email and says “did you see THE email?”. Of course, no context provided.
7. The CDO doesn’t know when to stop. Talking, writing, complaining, asking… The silence, the quiet and serenity is the enemy who can never prevail. Keeping the Drama up is crucial because it means he/she is “doing something”.
8. The CDO doesn’t consider “now”, everything is about recriminating the past and creating the perfect condition to say “I told you so” in the near future.
9. The CDO doesn’t like to work behind your back and prefer to be confrontational and passive-aggressive because that would create more discomfort, which is to CDO as blood is to vampires.
10. While incessantly complaining about the need of planning, the CDO thrive in urgency.

What to NOT do when interacting with a CDO

Once you spotted who he/she is, there are only 3 rules you must consider to protect yourself.

1. Never ever try to minimise the Drama. That would give super-mega-powers to the CDO.
2. Never ever play the game trying to out-drama a CDO. You’d never win.
3. Never ever ever, no matter what, “lose it”. It is the CDO holy grail.

The only way to deal with a CDO

Be TEFLON.

Make sure nothing stick.

Thank you for reading.

This post first appeared in my blog https://www.maurotoselli.com/blog