Remove foot from mouth!

So do you ever have an interaction with someone where you walk away and still hours later you are thinking to yourself, "I want to rewind and redo that entire encounter"?

I had this occur at work today.  I've got a functional area that has had a history of performance problems and I am now hyper-sensitive to any indication that it might be off track again.  I participated in two meetings with this team on two different aspects of management.  The meeting in the morning did not fare well at all and drove my trouble-dar (like a radar for trouble... yes, this should be a real word!) into high alert.  By the time we regrouped for the second topic this afternoon, I was on the cliff to over-reacting and raring/ready to jump.  I set a tone in that meeting that was overly aggressive/attacking, which did nothing for facilitating a successful resolution to the issue.

By about 9pm tonight, I'm still stewing on this and have finally calmed enough to try to see what I'm doing to contribute to this problem.  I asked a trusted friend about the interaction and he was kind enough to tell me the truth.  I DID in fact over-react.  He reminded me that the lead of this area is new to the job and has probably not had the good fortune to have great mentoring as he stepped into this high visibility/high stress position.   He also passed on this sage tip that he'd gotten from my good old friend Bob Chiusano, "a true leader does their best to make the weakest link successful".

I was definitely not a leader today.

Action 1 tomorrow morning?  Call that lead and apologize.

Action 2:  Offer that lead the option to get some mentoring with me.  I may not know the technical details of the job but I have been a lead for the last decade at Rockwell and have learned a lot of "what not to do" by experience.

Action 3: Contact my other weakest links and reach out to understand what I can do to help them.  My goal will be to message this as a question rather than a demand (which I'm sure you are not shocked to know is hard for me).  How the message is delivered is essential in convincing the recipients to accept the help.  ;o)