Sometimes Being Oh So Right Is So Very Wrong

You all know a person like this.

He’s the guy that has to get his way when it comes to…well, anything. Big or small. Everyone at work agrees they are hungry and they like the idea of the Italian joint down the street. This guy is saying things like:

“Pasta makes me super drowsy in the afternoons…”

“You know, I heard this other place has pasta too…”

“Last time I went there, it wasn’t so good. We should really try…”

“Weren’t we just there last week? Let’s spice things up and go to…”

Eventually everyone either gets tired of this guy and decides to go to the place he wants to go or they tell him to suck it up and he pouts all of lunch. This person is left uninvited to the next lunch and is ostracized completely out of the group. The guy’s insatiable need to always get his way has cost him a seat at the most important table of all: the lunch table.

You Can Be Right But Not “Right”

What reminded me of the ever-present Mr. Right was my post earlier this week about how HR people are terrified of employee friendly legislation. What I intended to post was an example of how HR people are often reactionary to new legislation, work their tail off opposing it and are subsequently unprepared for the new paradigm hitting their office.

I am so right on this thing but I totally screwed up. What did I do? Stelzner’s comment got me thinking about it a bit more. Here’s where I bonked my head:

1. I spent a very short amount of time talking about common goals. I did say that my example, the EFCA, was a very bad, bad bill. But I didn’t acknowledge the second commonality: we all want what’s best for our business and we likely all think we are doing what is best for our business.
2. I spent a ton of time talking about a certain, limited tactic I disliked when it came to how to approach the EFCA issue. I reread the post and that was the meat and potatoes of it (and it is still true, I don’t like it). But it was ticky tacky and really getting worked up about, in the bigger picture, a really small, petty issue.
3. I didn’t make my big point clear enough. I found myself defining it several times over because I communicated it extremely poorly in the initial post. That means people commented on the part where I criticize the focus of blogs that talk about the EFCA frequently.

So even though I feel I am right, I might as well be wrong. It was more important for me to communicate that I was right than to communicate in a way that made sense to the reader. So people read that I get tired of EFCA talk but they assume I am easily annoyed, love unions and/or completely naive.

Keeping In Mind The Big Picture

Going back to our Mr. Right example, the problem that he had was that he was missing the big picture. The goal of the lunch exercise isn’t to eat at the place he wanted to eat. This is an area in life where we frequently compromise with a spouse, friends, and family so it should be expected that you aren’t going to eat at a place you always want to eat at. The bigger picture that Mr. Right misses is that he is getting to accompany co-workers to a lunch where informal networking and communication will take place that can seriously raise his organizational IQ. Because he was such an idiot about such a little detail like where to eat, he started to miss out on more and more of these events. Now every time he goes out, he can eat where he likes but it is going to be by himself. Not so smart.

The same thing happened in my post about the EFCA. I posted errantly without thinking as well as I could have about the bigger message I was trying to convey. I missed a golden opportunity to share what I consider to be a critical message to HR people: your companies need you, now more than ever, to be proactive and critically thinking about legislation and how it will impact your particular workplace.

The comments on that post were great but obviously the post set the tone for the comments that followed and it could have been different if I had thought about it more than I did. Next time, I’ll think less about being right and more about sending a message that is actually true to my heart.

Maybe there is a greater lesson here too? Nah, I think it only applies to blogging.