Imagine this. I had been with a company for 3 months and had spent several weeks cleaning the software code in our live website. I had finally resolved most of the most serious issues. I was happy.
And then, BANG, someone had added new issues!
How would you react when you feel that people simply don't care?
In my previous job, I would shown all my anger and frustration. We had made a commitment to do better, I had spent weeks improving things and, yet, someone did it again. I wanted to shout how disrespectful that was.
But this time, I decided to try a different approach after reading Dale Carnegie's "How to Make friends and Influence People"
I crafted an email appealing to the professional pride of my 25 colleagues. Sent it to our group email and went home.
The following morning everyone was talking about my email.
When I arrived to work the following morning, it seemed that everyone was talking to me about my email. Even people beyond our group of developers.
Turns out that I had sent the email to everyone in the 200+ people department.
"I'd like you to change how this team works..."
Weeks later, my departmental manager offered me the possibility to become the team manager on a trial basis.
My email had made people look at how I was doing things. My boss wanted me to bring what I was doing to the rest of the team.
One mistake is how I had my first break into management.
But the key of the story is not the mistake. That only helped expose what I was doing. The key is how I dealt with the situation:
I offered a more positive approach
I appealed to people's professional pride
I was role-modelling what that meant
I was showing leadership in my approach even without the title or seniority. And that made me stand out at that point in time.
How can this story help you?
Over a decade later, whenever I have to interact with people I still remind myself of the following tips:
Try to understand the context as much as I can
Try to figure out what's the, often good, intent people have in their actions
Offer a positive, constructive and respectful approach in my interaction with others.
It's surprising how many times this helps deliver a good interaction.