I was at a meeting recently with my mentor and friend, Paul
Martinelli. He said something in that
meeting that has had me reeling and searching through my memories. He said, “You have to stop before you begin
keeping score. When you keep score, it
leads to the three R’s: Resistance,
Revenge, and ultimately Resentment.” He
said when you start going down the relationship hole of you did this and I did
that and you begin to tally the results, it leads to you withholding or
retaliating until the threshold of resentment is reached. Once resentment has set in, it is extremely
difficult to hold on to the relationship.
From a context perspective, I am a data driven person. Not necessarily to keep tally of score, but
to look for trends and patterns to help find areas of improvement in business
processes. I even wrote a chapter in my
book called “Data Rules All…” This conversation
made me reflect on my past teachings and determine if some of my project failures
came from tallying data.
I realized this is not the case. Data collection and trend analysis is
paramount to improvement. What I learned
through reflection is in how we use the data.
I started to go back to the painful projects. The ones that still can keep me up at night
if I think about them. I read through
some of my old documents and looked at them through this light. When a project does go bad, or at least is
starting to, it is typical to reflect and begin to prepare your cover. However, I could tell in many of those
documents, revenge and some resentment was flowing through. Especially when you start to write documents
with dates and things that have occurred.
I ask you as the reader to reflect on some of the more tumultuous times
and determine were you simply seeking revenge, or did you resent the person or
company that you were dealing with?
As I was contemplating this, I had an opportunity recently
to put it in action. We had a
development project that was not going as planned for a variety of
reasons. It was certainly shared by both
sides; however, the client was growing increasingly angry. I then received the email that had dates and
what they saw us do wrong. My old
behavior would be to fill in the blanks of dates and the rest of the
story. I immediately felt myself go into
the mode of keeping score. Yes, we had delays,
but you caused XX number of days as well.
Quickly I realized this feeling and started to ask myself a few
questions. Did I want to keep this
customer? Yes. Was the relationship more important than my
ego or being right? Yes. Whether I proved my point or just accepted
the blame, would they still do business with us? Not sure.
That is where I started.
When we got on the call, the first thing I said that it was
all on me. I will take the hit. Here is where we are and here is where we will
be in this time. I stated that I didn’t want
to go through all of the history because all that would do is cause us to
defend each other’s position and would not serve the project. So here is where we are, what would you like
to do? The tension immediately
waned. All parties went into problem
solving mode and positive momentum was gained.
I do not advocate that this is the appropriate approach for
all occasions. What I do advocate is to
think of Paul’s poignant words and look through that filter before you make any
decisions on how to go forward.
No Day But Today,
Rick
