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| Angry Penguin (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
Don't sweat the small stuff. In the overall grand scheme of the eye-in-the-sky, most of our issues with it are small stuff indeed. Oft repeated advice but seldom applied especially in the professional sphere of life.
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It's only natural that when a group of dramatically varied humans get together (let's repeat the obvious, no two people are alike and even the minor differences between them total to the hundreds) to work on a common task linked to a deadline and to their month end compensations, there will be disagreement. The nature of that disagreement ranges from polite "It would be better if..." to the thermo-nuclear "I think you are wrong..." despite both arguments making the same points.
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Presentation and tact matter but there are times when the pitchfork carrying guy with the horns and the tail gets his act together and drags the storms of confrontation along with him purely for his entertainment. Most office arguments may actually be fun to watch from an objective observer's perspective as they are about petty matters indeed.
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Personally speaking, having been in some not-so-peace-love-and-flowers situations at the workplace over the years, I have always seen things settle down eventually. Much like a married couple who surf over the occasional tiff, the teams at almost every workplace have figured their own paths to return to the routine. I remember the incidents but more as a remote event that happened to someone else in some other life. In that I have been lucky, because both parties (I hope) share the mutual feeling of "Well, we disagreed... strongly, but we still need to get the job done."
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In this quest to let bygones be bygones, I have recently discovered a major enemy. Archived e-mails. Yes, the angry words which flew through cyberspace to land in your colleague's inbox or vice versa. The other day I was digging through my virtual communications from the past for some project worked on back in the day and I chanced upon a few of these terse exchanges of words. Location vs location sometimes and team member versus team member at other times.
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Reading them now that I chanced upon them made the situations come alive again. The brain is a softie applying the varnish of nostalgia to every memory but if for any strange God forsaken reason you feel the urge to relive the bitterness in real time, read them old e-mails. The content is all professional but of course, behind the precise choice of words, the true intent of the stressed out individual writing them gleams through.
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Do I now want to take up cudgels against the same individuals or teams now that my mind has re-entered battle mode? Not really. It was nothing but foolishness on my behalf to read those old e-mails and much as I'd like to blame the others for what happened, I was as much to blame for the escalating argument as reading my end of the communications revealed. Let's just say I was lot less tactful and a lot more aggravated than the situation called for.
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After a healthy bout of exercise using the Delete button on my keyboard, I did come away with an insight that my less-than-sharp nature had previously failed to note. Words matter, their timing matters and the method used to convey them matters. Speak or listen to a person face to face or even duke it out over the phone - it all disappears into the toy chest of stuff-that-happened-in-my-life fitting into little corners and spaces often obscured by other stuff that keeps piling on.
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Misunderstanding and frustration are occasional byproducts of our workdays but they are best resolved person to person if a resolution is to be found. There is really no sense in giving them an electronic afterlife. Those words on the screen with their perfectly formed fonts, they like to hang around and will always stare the recipient in the face in a cold, unemotional way like only a computer can while also transporting a wave of the sender's anger & splatting the recipient in the face.
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No more anger, at least not on cyberspace. When angry, count to ten. If still angry, count to one hundred.
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