What do you do when you have a great idea and want it to run and run?
Often, if you are like me, you are super keen and enthusiastic. You want to contact as many people as possible and try to find out lots of information. You then try to join up the dots and, as I was “taught” in the military, try to give people a solution rather than a problem. It does work sometimes but not recently for me.
Sometimes, we may need to consider the context. What about the personal circumstances of others. Everyone needs to be treated sensitively.
I fell foul of such a situation this week as my enthusiasm found me offering suggestions and making contact with a myriad of groups to establish a way forward with an issue a group of us wished to solve. However, my ‘deadlines’ were not their deadlines, also my perceived outcomes were not as they saw the outcome.
That degree of communication, to know: how people operate; how people wish to receive communication; and what people wish to see at the end game can cause friction.
How can you resolve that? I believe that we need to come clean. Firstly apologise for making such assumptions and resolving those lines of communication, and accepting when people wish to be contacted. I recall, some years ago, Volkswagen deciding not to allow their staff to use email outside of work hours.
Can we survive with ‘business’ using such policies? I wonder if VW still do this?
Do you know?