Miscommunication - the funny and the frustrating. Between e-mail and working in the global marketplace, we are all at risk of an unintended interpretation of our communication. I had a co-worker who had recently immigrated from China. But he spoke English so well that I didn’t even think twice when I told him we were going to eat chicken fingers for lunch. Have you ever once thought about that literally? So you can imagine the look on his face.

And e-mail is a minefield. Unlike a phone call, it is a one way communication. When you aren’t clear and you are on the telephone, you hear the person’s immediate reaction and make a swift correction. But in email you may not know you have offended or been unclear until you get an angry reply – or worse, no reply at all. If I hadn’t seen the look on my Chinese friend’s face, it wouldn’t have occurred to me that I had horrified him.

It is also frustrating when you get a reply to a question, but not an actual answer. Recently a volley of e-mail involving several people resulted in an agreement that one of two actions had to be taken by “Mary.” When following up about the problem I specifically asked Mary was action A done or was action B done. The answer I got back was “Yes.” Technically speaking I guess that would be a correct answer if I only wanted to know if either action had been taken. But in the context of the e-mail I thought I was clear that I wanted to know which! So I tried again asking Mary WHICH one was done. The reply was “It was done.” I asked another recipient of the same e-mail if I was being obtuse, but she reassured that my question still had not been answered. So she offered to find out from Mary’s boss. When she asked him about it, his answer was “Mary did it.” At that point we actually stopped caring about the entire thing. I am certain that this question will come up again before the project is over. If asked, I will just say “Ask Mary.”

Meanwhile, buffalo wings anyone?

“… if I turn out to be particularly clear you’ve probably misunderstood what I’ve said.” Alan Greenspan

At the end of a kind of a day that makes you want to buy a bottle of scotch and a straw, I had to go to the A&P supermarket. I was disheartened to see that the shortest line was that of the surliest checker (recently she told a friend of mine to put down a magazine unless she was going to buy it). I just wasn’t in the mood to to deal with rudeness on top of my already taxing day, so I went to another line.

Miraculously, I ended up with a checker who was cheery and pleasant and made you feel like you were in a neighborhood grocery store. Her cordiality made the three people on her line smile. It so lifted my spirits that I actually took the time to go to her supervisor to compliment her.

Big mistake. After my saying how nice it was to be treated so cheerfully, the supervisor made a face and essentially said that the checker wastes time being nice and has to pay more attention to making the line move faster. I was horrified!  Here I was paying a compliment to the employee and the supervisor starts criticizing her to me, as well as pretty clearly inferring that I was wrong.  My bad day came hurling back through this exchange. Rather than having a pleasant conversation about satisfying service, I end up complaining to a surly supervisor about her bad behavior.

Is this just a New York thing? Have we gotten so miserable, pressured, and jaded that we now prefer speed over civility? The cashier wasn’t slowing things down that I could see, just doing her job with cheer. And having seen how badly some customers treat the cashiers, her ability to remain pleasant was an achievement.

The thing that bothered me the most afterward is the feeling that I have no remedy. I can’t go to another market without greatly inconveniencing myself. Yet it irritates me to give them my money. In reality I know I am going to have to be content with writing one of my famous letters to corporate headquarters, and writing about it here on my blog. I may not get anything but a form letter in reply, if that. But, you never know when that one more letter will tip the scales.

Maybe it’s time for a new grassroots movement – complete with catch phrases for your placards: Don’t Settle for Surly, Profit from Pleasant, Rue your Rude, Nuke the Nasty. But what I really want to do is find another job for that great cashier, before they crush her spirit.

Have a lovely day, and come back again soon.

“If you make customers unhappy in the physical world,

they might each tell 6 friends.

If you make customers unhappy on the Internet,

they can each tell 6,000 friends.”

-  Jeff Bezos

For many people, 2010 was an unlucky year – better than 2008/2009 maybe, but still challenging. We always hope that the New Year will be “the year” – the year we lose weight, save money, quit the job, etc. But if often seems like the odds are against us and other people have all the luck.

So maybe this year, the #1 goal should be to become a lucky person.

A recent article in Readers Digest suggests that this is doable. Now maybe it won’t work for winning the lotto or my eternal dream of getting the BIG check from David Sayers of Publishers Clearing House (yes, I know his name and what he looks like; I am prepared). But according to the article there are specific ways to “get lucky” (ok, calm down, that is not what I meant).

Evidently, lucky people share these attributes:

• Seize chance opportunities. Alter your normal activities to increase these. Walk a different route, talk to new people at gatherings, read a magazine you wouldn’t normally have an interest in.
• Use positive expectations to create self fulfilling prophesies. My mom always said “Prepare for the worst, but expect the best.” So it’s not about living in la la land, it’s about not falling into the trap of always believing that only the worst will happen, because then that is all you see.
• Have a resilient attitude that sees the lucky side of unlucky situations. It’s like if you are in an accident you can focus on being miserable because it happened, or on being grateful/lucky that it wasn’t worse.

Happy New Year, and Good Luck

“Luck is a matter of preparation meeting opportunity.” ~ Oprah Winfrey

I just read a great book by Joseph T. Hallinan – “Why We Make Mistakes”. This book explains scientifically what I, as your sometimes enabler, often try to reinforce: You were not designed to be perfect!

The author supplies plenty of evidence that shows that your brain actually functions in ways that not only make it easy to make certain mistakes, but, in fact, makes it more likely that you will.

For one thing, your brain likes the gist of things and sometimes eschews those pesky details. If the brain senses it is unlikely to find something wrong odds are it won’t. It’s called a quitting threshold. One of the examples given is the work of the airport baggage screeners, who of course don’t expect to find something in the vast majority of cases. But this is the kind of situation where the quitting threshold kicks in. The author quotes tests that showed screeners at LAX missed 75 percent of the bomb materials hidden by undercover agents. Subject to the same type of quitting threshold, it is doubtful that the new electronic “strip search” machines will yield much better results.

Just because I have absolved you of the pressure of being perfect doesn’t mean we can’t help our poor defective brains along. That is why it is important that processes, systems and products are designed to help us avoid making errors.

One problem I had was the bank’s fondness of making my debit card the same color as my credit card. I kept incurring fees for doing cash withdrawals on the credit card instead of the debit card. I came up with a few ways to help avoid making this mistake:

• Mark the cards boldly with a Sharpie pen
• Ask the bank to disable the credit card cash advance feature
• Give the cards different pin numbers  so the action is less automatic (of course remembering them presents another challenge!)

Now why couldn’t the banks anticipate this problem and make the cards significantly different? Perhaps they DID anticipate it and decided they would rather gain from all the fees they would collect from hapless users!

P.S. Computers aren’t without error either. My grammar checker just tried to get me to change the word your in the second line to you’re. I fought it and I won.

A colleague of mine recently said, “Very often, people don’t leave jobs, they leave managers.” The best workplace can be ruined by a bad manager. And when I say bad, I don’t just mean someone who is unpleasant to work for. Someone who is unskilled in people management cause problems as well.

Six Management Sins

Ineffective – Can the employee count on the manager to run interference when necessary, keep confidences, solve problems?

Weak – Does the manager fail to replace employees who are unproductive or who make the workplace unpleasant or unproductive for others? Confession time – I learned this lesson in my first management role when after a few months, my best and most irreplaceable employee came to me and asked me what did “Gina” have to do before I would fire her? I knew then that I had failed my best people by putting off firing my worst one. I never made that mistake again.

Tactless – Does the manager temper public statements? A former mentor of mine always said counsel in private, praise in public. Public humiliation does not breed respect.

Inappropriate – Unbelievably, I once had a boss who scratched himself in, um, indecorous places during meetings (I swear to God).

Inattentive – is the manager unaware of the employee’s workload, well being? Do they touch base periodically. I loathe micro management and most people appreciate being allowed to work independently. At the same time, an employee needs to know their manager is conscious of their skills/contributions and has a plan for your future.

Partiality – Excluding merit-based rewards, is there an actual or even perceived favoritism when it comes to perks, choice assignments or face time?

Scarcity of jobs is no excuse for poor management. When the boom comes there is always an exodus of the best people if they have been poorly managed. I have been extremely lucky over the years because as an employee and as a consultant I have worked for great managers (the scratcher excluded).

If you are lucky enough to work for a good one, remember them on National Boss Day, October 15^th.

Texting – here is a generational divide that I think will be difficlt to breach.  It’s not that people of “a certain age” are not capable of texting. As my friend Donna, who wanted me to write about this says, we get it, in certain circumstances it is quicker and easier than a call. It’s the rudeness factor and the resulting expectations that many have trouble with.

It is hard not to be offended when, in the midst of a conversation, a companion whips out the cell phone and replies to a text message – or even just sends one! The same person who might be persuaded to let a call go to voice mail during dinner, will reply to a text message with the urgency of an ER doctor attending to a severed limb. And the messages are often not important – “wru” or “swu” (to people from the past, that means “where are you,” and “so what’s up.”)

I was horrified reading an exchange on Facebook where people were saying that it is rude NOT to immediately respond to a text message! Huh? Are we all now to be at each other’s beck and text 24/7?

At the office, most instant messaging systems allow you to turn on a status of “In a meeting”, or “Do Not Disturb”. Maybe cell phones need the same thing – like a setting that says “Don’t text me- I’m with Mom and unless you are bleeding she willl freak out if I reply to you now.” Or “I just need some alone time right now, and no, I am not freakishly reclusive.” How about “I have a 25 cent a minute plan and can’t afford to get your text right now.”

Sigh. In the future perhaps all communication will consist of 3 letter abbreviations and a device implanted in your head that will force you to immediately receive every transmission in every form that anyone wants to foist on you – with no off switch. Until then maybe we need to be “in a meeting” a little more often.

It is almost always easier to make decisions about what other people should do in a given situation. You hear their problem and, unless it is on the level of seriousness of brain surgery, the path that they should take seems crystal clear to you – obvious – why don’t they see that?

So how come that problem solving ability seems to vanish when you have to make decisions about your own life? My theory is that our own decision making process gets bound up by our emotional attachment to the outcome. Afraid to make the wrong decision, we get stuck and often haunted by the jeering ghost of a bad decision from the past (like why didn’t I listen when my mother told me not to buy a plain white kitchen floor).

To try to remove some of the angst, first clarify the decision to be made, weigh all the alternatives, and then ask other people. The last can be the most important, as long as you do it after all your other research first. You never know who will lend a different perspective that you had not considered. You are not asking them to make the decision for you (though I wish for that sometimes). Just lay out the problem and the information you have and ask:

• Can you think of any other information I need to have?
• Can you think of questions to ask myself?
• What do you think you would do in my situation and why?

Other people’s input, whether fact or opinion, expert or not, will throw light on the decision that you have, subconsciously, already made. If their opinions are in line with yours it will make you feel validated. If it really conflicts with what your gut tells you it can make you trust your own feelings more. But often, someone will just offer a piece of info or ask you a question that opens up a whole new way of considering the problem, as my friend Janet did for me recently.

The key here is to not only ask the person you KNOW will agree with what may already be in your heart. We all have friends who can enable us in our decisions – frivolous or serious – and will tell us what we secretly want to hear (if I want to buy something I call Marian LOL). But for a really solid decision you have to ask the contrarians as well because they may make you consider things in a different way.

I have had to make so many big decisions this summer that right now my fondest wish is for a few weeks where I don’t have to make any decisions beyond Dewars or Chivas! In fact, I will let you guys decide even that!

A popular magazine recently asked its readers what they would do if they had an entire day off with no obligations or responsibilities – as though that would be a total fantasy. The fact that this question was posed should be at least faintly horrifying. We must be the most overworked, over committed society on the planet.

Why the guilt about spending some time in an unproductive stupor? What is wrong with us that we cannot sometimes enjoy the playground that life on this beautiful planet is meant to be?

The 4S RX

Shirk some responsibility. You are not Atlas and the planet will not roll off your shoulders if you shrug. Do you feel that if you don’t do it won’t get done? Well, what is the consequence of that? If it is significant, someone else will do it – for a change. Maybe you haven’t given them a chance to. Maybe the house doesn’t have to be that clean.  Maybe someone else won’t do it as well as you – so what?

Squander some time. Admire the clouds, appreciate some flowers, stare at your child’s beautiful face, go to the movies in the middle of the day, go to a museum, take a stroll  (not a power walk) in a botanical garden or a park. It will lower your blood pressure.

Swap some tasks. Why can’t a spouse occasionally take over the chores/childcare/etc for one weekend day while the other gets a break – a real break – not time to do more stuff. Swap play dates with other moms to get some kid-free time. What about friends giving each other a nite off from cooking once a week by cooking extra (don’t count on me for this one – I stopped cooking raw food when my son moved out.)

Simplify everything. We spend a lot of time doing needless things. I just read an article on Yahoo.com that claims it can actually damaging to your dishes to pre-wash them before putting them in the dishwasher! Use online bill pay and Quicken to manage your finances. Before you buy another something, consider how much you will use it and how much effort it will take to maintain it. Where possible, hire others (you can’t do it all yourself, that’s why God invented other people.)

So, beloved readers, I am not going to ask you what you would do with a free day, but when are you giving yourself that gift?

These days it is so tough to attract a new job or a new client that the only way out seems to be to give up and cry. Well I am all for a good cry now and then – in fact I fully endorse 24-72 hours of abject wallowing in self pity (with brownies and/or ice cream) after any of life’s larger disappointments. But after that it is time to let the hankie dry.

So to paraphrase Richard Bolles, what color is your handkerchief? What would you do if you had no choice but to change direction in your professional life? June is a great month to ponder this and reassess your skills and passions. Why June? I don’t know, I just made that up, but it seems to be an optimistic sort of month – what with all the graduations and weddings.

We didn’t all grow up to be the fireman or princess that we imagined as a child (I wanted to be Penny from Sky King). That said, often our true selves can be gleaned from what our childhood joys and dreams were before they were thwarted by practicality and doubt. See if you can recover some of it by asking yourself these questions. The answers may hold the key to the next door to open in your life.

• What did you love as a child? (My son is actually making a living out of all the things that fascinated him as a child – electricity, lights, buttons and switches.)
• Who were your heros? (real or fictional)
• What did you dream of doing when you grew up?
• How did you occupy yourself when there weren’t others to play with?
• What was your favorite subject in school?
• Who was your favorite grownup and why?
• What filled you with dread?

If you are crazed list maker like I am, kneel at the altar of the internet gods in thanks that there are many sites that can help you either simplify your list making, or, at worst, turn you into a obsessive person who never actually gets anything done because you are too busy keeping the lists up to date.

• Springpad – Thank you Barbara Weltman for mentioning this site in your Idea of the Day. This online application organizes information for you in a very efficient way. You choose the type of information from a drop down list – books, tasks, restaurants, movies, etc. – type the info or paste a link and the application automatically stores it in a list of ready made folders that is beautifully simple and uncluttered. If you are creating a task it prompts you for a due date, and gives you a list to categorize it – such as family, work, chores. There is a single point of entry for all items, which I like.  You can share items to Facebook and Twitter or via e-mail. It is free right now and, yes, there is an iPhone app for that.
• Remember the Milk – A benefit of this application is that you can use it offline. You also have a mailbox so that you can e-mail an item to yourself and it automatically becomes a task in your list. You can assign dates and the estimated amount of time you think a task will take. You do have to create different categories of tasks in separate tabs and there are only 3 – work, study, and personal. You can set tasks to recur and the lists can be sorted and assigned priorities.The basic online app is free but you can upgrade to get more features.
• Gubb – This free online application starts out by letting you select your list names from a variety of categories. If you are planning a wedding or a move there are special list titles for that. I loved the suggestion of a “One Day” list of Things to Try, Life Goals, and Places to Visit. However, I was then disappointed that they did not group the lists according to category, which was what I expected. You can add to the list via e-mail or text message, and you can have the list sent to you. Others can view your list if you choose to share it with them. A cool feature is that you can choose to be reminded of a task at a date and time via e-mail or text message. This app would be a match if you do like to create a lot of different lists, and you like to color code them.

I am still hopelessly attached to my old Lotus Organizer desktop program, which I think is great but since IBM isn’t developing it anymore I don’t recommend it to people. It also doesn’t have an online version. If you are looking for an online organizer, check out all 3 above to see which clicks for you in terms of look and feel. For my followers who instead need enabling and wish to forget lists, remember, if you procrastinate long enough, the task becomes either impossible, unnecessary, or done by someone else.