I’m embarrassed and ashamed of my behavior in a very difficult situation today. Fortunately, I was involved in a discussion with someone who had the courage to call me out, in the most polite way.
For the past several weeks, I’ve been involved in frustrating situation with a vendor of ours. We are using some of this vendor’s products right now—but having problems with them. At the same time, we needed to upgrade and expand the products this vendor supplies.
I’ve been talking to a series of sales people at this vendor. As you might guess, their whole focus was on the upgrade and expansion. They kept selling me on those products, while not addressing the issues we were having with products we were currently using. I kept trying to get them focused on resolving the issues first, before looking at the upgrade and expansion.
They’d reply, “We’ll get those taken care of, but let’s talk about the upgrades….” We went through several conversation, they kept talking about the “deal,” while ignoring the issues with the current products. In each call with each sales person, they kept focusing on pitching me.
Finally, I had to get a manager involved. He was the first person to focus on the issues we were having with the current products. He never even brought up the new products. But my frustration had been mounting over the weeks of prior conversations. At one point I snapped, I was pissed off, and said, “This is so F**ked Up! I just need to get this problem solved!”
He stopped the conversation immediately. He was silent for a moment, then said, “I know you are frustrated, but that kind of language is totally inappropriate. It doesn’t help us in solving this problem. Please stop doing that.”
We were silent for a moment, we continued the conversation. I was still frustrated, but we focused on solving the problem. We got it addressed and we concluded the meeting. At the end of the conversation, he said something very important,
“I know you were frustrated and we didn’t handle the situation well. But as much as we may disagree, or debate, that kind of language has no place in these conversations. I have no problem with very difficult conversations, but when we lose civility and the ability to recognize these differences, we don’t accomplish anything. I’m sorry I had to call you out, I don’t know how it will impact our future relationship, but I needed to let you know this.”
My respect for this manager skyrocketed. I thanked him for the observation, I acknowledged my behavior was totally inappropriate, apologized, and thanked him for having the courage to call me out.
He did something else, that earned even more respect. He didn’t try to upsell me. He wanted to focus on my immediate problem and we will talk about the new business when appropriate.
Each of us encounter very difficult situations. Whether it’s with our people, customers, suppliers. We each experience frustration. We encounter people with different, sometimes conflicting positions. But high impact collaborative conversations, regardless our disagreements must be based on respect for the people we are working with.
I can’t thank this manager enough for reminding me of something I know, but lost in my frustration. It takes huge courage.
Afterword, below is the AI generated discussion about this post. I’m always fascinated with their interpretation of what I write.
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