I Lost It with My Staff Today
We’ve been having some major database problems for the past two days. I only heard about the problems when my boss called me to warn me she was going to forward an angry email about how much our CRM software sucked. Our CRM software does suck, but I could tell from the problems the complainant alluded to that this wasn’t actually a CRM problem. I ask around and hear, “Yeah, we’re working on it.” I look at our Help Desk outage/disruption site: no mention. So, folks are trying to get their work done and the systems are failing and there’s no communication about anything.
We had a meeting this morning to review the problem and discuss next steps. I talked about the communication problem. Everyone agreed that there was a communication problem. That’s it. They just said, “Yes, I know. We have a communication problem!” So I lost it. I didn’t actually yell or scream, but I did suggest that if folks couldn’t communicate then, they couldn’t actually do their jobs. And I asked each person how s/he was going to solve this problem.
Our communication difficulties aren’t problems with one person or one group. They are systemic, cultural, and will take a while to fix.
But one thing I tried to stress is that when there’s a problem, that’s when you need to communicate the most. Even when it means you need to stop fixing the problem to communicate what’s going on. It’s better for there to be a delay with good communication than a faster fix but no communication. This seems to be hard for people to understand.
So, in this case, we’re delaying a system reboot in order to communicate what’s happened and that there will be a system reboot on Thursday. Our communication is going to follow the model of a former colleague, a system director who would send out announcements with a pithy summary followed by a “gory details” section. Even if the details were TMI, at least you felt people were being relatively open. Relatively.
Celeste said:
Apr 16, 08 at 7:29 amOh man, I miss hlf’s summaries. They were great. I’m glad you’re adopting them!
HLF said:
Apr 16, 08 at 8:39 amSo am I! 🙂 I occasionally got in to trouble with senior management for those posts (“don’t tell them what we did wrong, they might ask more questions!”), but they were well worth it in terms of the credibility we got with the campus.
Bill said:
Apr 16, 08 at 10:56 amSpot on. The “don’t tell them what we did wrong, they might ask more questions!” attitude was the core problem that led to all the communications issues, as well as the resulting distrust of the organization.
Good luck with with fixing the communication issue. Hopefully having the initiative “come down from on high” should help get things moving in the right direction.
admin said:
Apr 16, 08 at 5:15 pmThanks, and thanks for the nice example, HLF! I think the more we communicate, the more people will realize that it doesn’t actually lead to more questions, it reduces them and build trust, and the more people won’t mind.