I Can Not Talk to You without a Form!

Have you wondered about the demise of our quality of relationships within the workplace? For the purposes of this blog, I am going to stick to the workplace for this writing as the state of relationships outside the workplace is way over my head. There are lots of challenges within today’s workplace environments – not enough time, frantic change, seemingly impossible and sometimes contradictory objectives….

In the midst of it all, we seem to have lost a level of civility and lack conversations that ebb and flow with the daily demands of our jobs. We assume the worst. Patrick Lencioni talks about the Fundamental Attribution Error developed by E.E. Jones and V.A. Harris – “the tendency of human beings to attribute the negative or frustrating behaviors of their colleagues to their intention and personalities, while attributing their own negative or frustrating behaviors to environmental factors.” This natural tendency is exacerbated by superficial relationships; superficial relationships are exacerbated by the institutionalization of our exchanges.

I said I was not going to go outside the workplace, but here is a non-workplace example. Many years ago, too many to count, when I was a kid growing up in a neighborhood outside Washington, D.C., everyone in the neighborhood knew each other. Kids knew kids, parents knew parents. If a bike was inadvertently "borrowed" David’s mother called Joe’s mother. The bike was returned and David’s fate was left to his parents. In today’s world the police would be called, a report would be filed and if the bike is like most bikes these days and worth hundreds of dollars, David will have a criminal record, a probation officer and will have brought shame and embarrassment to his family. For one moment, think of the time, energy and resources spent by the institutionalized response. A response due in large part to our lack of relationships - knowing each other at a level that allows for the occasional uncomfortable conversation.

Similar institutionalization occurs in the offices and corridors of our business. In employee performance review processes for example the supervisor waits for the performance review form before communicating achievements or areas in need of improvement. They hide behind numbers or categories versus a timely and authentic conversation with their staff. Instead of a, “Hey Joe, let’s talk about how you managed the client meeting today. I have some suggestions that might help,” the feedback instead becomes institutionalized on a form, forever in the file, with the inadvertent consequence of elevating the importance or severity of the employee’s behavior.

I am not suggesting that we do away with forms or that it is not important to clarify through documentation our expectations and views of related accomplishments and failures. What I am saying is that we could be much more effective and efficient if we minimized the institutionalizing of our exchanges with employees and spent more time getting to know our neighborhood of staff. Knowing and trusting each other really does make a difference when "time" is one of the few variables over which we have control.