Pick up the phone

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Singapore, 25^th March 2014
Picking up the phone can sometimes avoid a lot of problems and headaches. When we arrive at a point where tensions have developed in a project, sometimes about trivial issues, it is far better to pick up the phone and have a chat with the person in question. Written words have a tendency to live an own life and whoever reads them reads them through their own “tinted” glasses. We don’t read what is written, we translate what is written in terms of what we think it means and that is what we read or think we read. If someone says to you: “I am not coming”, it means I am not coming. It does not mean “I don’t like you” or “I don’t want to see you” or “did I do something wrong?” It could, but that is an assumption because we don’t really know. So as a principle “I am not coming” just means I am not coming.

But our mind has its own way of interpreting these things and when discussions and reactions heat up, my experience is to stay away from email writing and just pick up the phone to hear it from the horse’s mouth. It is amazing how much miss-conception exists when you start talking to each other as most of the time people always seem to explain statements and actions in a negative way.

I dealt with such issue today where in the end I decided to call the client after I felt that correspondences where spiralling out of control. The client in actual fact had tried to call as well. After we talked and listened to each other’s grieves we came to a sensible and professional resolve. In the end we each felt not acknowledged and appreciated, but in the end we all want the best for the project. We agreed that we should have picked up the phone and talked it through much earlier. By talking and listening to each other we also get to better understand where we may have missed a beat, as in these conflicts there is never one culprit. It takes two to tango, it takes two to resolve an issue. Just pick up the phone…

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