Too much…

Recently I was a witness to too much. There were two instances in which the reaction to situations was too much.

During a meeting of the employees, a question was asked about the changes to an old process. While there were a couple of employees who could have answered the question, their leader took the question on. Instead of describing the changes, that leader spent a bit of time talking about why the changes were made. There are times when it is important to expand on the “why”, but this wasn’t one of them. The changes to the process had been asked for a long time by the people who are part of the process. The buy-in was already there. Instead of just going over the changes, the leader spent too much time at the beginning of the question and at the end of the question.

The other situation was a little different. We have been working with a customer who has been challenging our organization. This customer had already pushed the team member who typically works with our customers who are having a hard time paying their bills to tears. The leader who is charged with the well-being of that employee stepped in and took that customer off our team member’s desk. At the same time this customer had been chewing through our billing team, he also started to attack our operations team claiming our equipment needed repair. My operations leader started off with taking that customer’s complaint seriously. In the process of working through the complaint, the leader was very good at explaining in detail how he was arriving at the decisions he was making with the customer. The leader’s too much showed up after it was recognized that the customer didn’t care, and that customer wasn’t going to change their mind. My leader was at his wits end when he came to my office to discuss the next steps. As we walked through the challenge, I advised him it was time to move away from trying to explain things in depth. This customer wasn’t going to listen and frankly didn’t care. The customer’s goal was to cause pain to our organization. When I started to point this out to the leader and advised him to use simple
statements about the decision, it was hard for him to transition from his desire to try to get the customer to agree to the leader’s assessment. It wasn’t going to happen, and it was time to end the conversation using short sentences; no more paragraphs.

It has been my experience over the years that some have a concern with what we are doing that is valid. When their problems aren’t correct, they do appreciate hearing more of the details as to why the decision was made. Then there are those customers and employees who do not show up in the conversation with an open mind. Conversely, there are times when leaders don’t show up in discussions with an open mind.

We all must be careful with “too much”. When my leader in my office realized the short answer was the best, weight came off his shoulders. The story of the other leader who didn’t just answer the question is still a work in progress…