Lessons From The Workplace #3 (yes, 3)
Once upon a time (January 11, 2019 to be exact), I started what was intended to be a periodic article series entitled “Lessons from the Workplace”. The topics would be an exploration of lessons that I had personally learned through my work experience. In a perfect world, my stories would resonate with someone and give them some food for thought. Lesson 1 was well received and seemed to hit that target.
"Lessons from the Workplace 2" was briefly published in 2019 shortly after Lesson 1. It was deleted within a few hours of publishing. The story I told in the second Lessons from the Workplace is a great ethical tale that needs to be shared. It will be again soon. However, I quickly found out that the originally published story needed a re-write.
Some readers misunderstood the story and believed that the story was about them, or about their company, or about others who might take offense, or written too aggressively, or a bunch of other critiques too numerous to mention. They were all valid. While the intention was to convey a positive result from a challenging event, somehow the story was interpreted in ways that took the focus off of the lesson and onto the individual reader. All of it was unintended, but now is an opportunity to share the lessons learned.
Lesson 1 – Beauty is in the eye of the beholder – Written communication is interpreted in the reader’s frame of reference, not read in the manner that you wrote it in. Always write your emails, letters, posts, etc. with the understanding that the reader may perceive your words to have a meaning that was not intended. It may be considered “old school”, but a face-to-face meeting leaves less room for misinterpretation.
Lesson 2 – Feedback is a good thing, even when it is negative. It was difficult to have such a negative reaction to my second Lessons from the Workplace after such a positive reaction to Lessons issue 1. It was painful enough to not go back to the well for over four years (ok, most of that time was just being busy doing other things… but you get the point). However, feedback is how you learn. If no one said anything, then all of those negative feelings remain out there sabotaging my true intent. It is far better to have people willing to tell you when you have messed up than to have all of that misinterpretation sitting behind the scenes waiting to surprise you when it is too late to address the issue. Both positive and negative feedback will help you to grow as an employee and as an individual. “You take the good, you take the bad, you take them both and there you have…” If you watched 1980’s television you know how to finish that lyric, and I owe you an apology for putting that song in your head for the rest of the day.
Lesson 3 – You never stop learning. – While the intention of writing these is to take my past experiences, share them in cyberspace, and hope that they provide some type of assistance to any given reader, apparently they are also teaching me that you never are too old to learn new lessons. The original Lesson 2 is still a story that I want to share with all of you. It is a life-shaping lesson that fits the purpose of these articles. However, I didn’t communicate it in a way that allowed it to be read that way. No matter how much career experience you have, you will always find yourself placed in new situations. Typically, your experience will help you to navigate those new challenges. Sometimes though, you find a blind spot and learn the tough lesson. I’ll take what I have learned from the original misstep and publish the revised Issue 2 soon.
