Own Your Piece to Have More Peace

Eric Thorsen
Sep 10, 2024
2 min read

When I'm working with business owners, they come to me with people problems:

🔅 Miscommunication in their meetings.

🔅 Frustration with their team.

🔅 People not doing things the way they expect them to.

I always ask them to pause and take a look at what their piece is.

Early in running my consulting business, we had a project that required high levels of redundancy just for specific days of the year.

Any downtime on those days would be a catastrophe for the client.

There had to be several layers of redundancy in each part of the system

…but that costs a lot of money.

Early on when we were doing this work, about a month out from one of these big event days, the lead engineer did not have all the redundancy fired up before one of these critical tests.

It was a miscommunication and I was angry.

It was clear from where I was sitting what was needed, but somehow they made a different decision and we got into it.

I felt entitled to be angry and they felt entitled to be defensive.

This was one of the early lessons for me as a leader.

I had to slow down, pause and really look at what my piece was.

What was I accountable for in this miscommunication?

They made a very different decision than I would have made.

Why?

What information did I have that they did not?

The answer in this case was that they were also instructed, by me, to make sure that they kept AWS costs down and under control.

More redundancy means higher costs.

That was the priority they were following.

They didn't have enough information to understand the priorities and the timelines of when the system really needed to be fully fired up for full redundancy.

Hence the miscommunication.

Does your team really have the information that they need to make the decisions the way that you're expecting them to do?

Do they have all the data parameters and priorities to make effective aligned decisions?

In my opinion, these skills need to be baked into your company culture.

Your team needs to be trained on how to communicate effectively when there is a miscommunication, you pause, each person can convey what they thought they can be accountable for their piece of what happened.

Then you can quickly start to get to resolution and avoid all the defensiveness and bad feelings that come along with that.