Honor your commitments!

At home:

Wife : Did you talk to your boss about taking a vacation next month?

Husband: No, I did not.

Wife: Why not? You were going to do it last week. Now we will be late in booking tickets. I really want to be able to see my parents this year. You can't do one thing right for me!

Husband: Stop nagging me about it! I tried bringing it up last week but everyone was quite stressed out with the project deadlines then.

Wife: Well, you could've just told me! You said you will do it and you didn't. If you just thought of letting me know, I wouldn't be that upset. You know how much this means to me. I haven't seen my family in years. It seemed like you didn't care about it.

Husband: I'm sorry. I guess I should've informed you. I didn't realize you were waiting on me to make a decision. I know it's uncomfortable not knowing what our plans are.

At work:

Manager: Liz, are you done with the software update yet?

Liz: No, I'm not. None of the test benches were available this week and so I didn't get any debugging time.

Manager: Well, why didn't you let me know that your work was impeded? I am responsible to get the software released next week and we are not done yet.

Liz: (getting all defensive) I was working overtime just to get this delivered but it's not my fault that the other group was using the test bench!

Manager: I am not blaming you for not working hard. Everyone in this office is very hard-working. But, if only you had given me a heads-up, I would have been able to either help you out or planned for a late release. I want to you understand that if you can't keep the date you committed to, let me know beforehand. It just gives me enough time to react to impediments and change the plan. Honor your commitments or don't commit to something you can't do!

Liz: I see why you are so upset now. I assure you this will never happen again.

 

Are you a goal keeper?

Sometimes we get so involved in our mundane tasks that we lose focus of our goal. Whether at work or at home, I am sure we have all been through times like these.

Let me share a story with you. I am part of this workplace improvement group at work. We organize fairly good seminars and events to help employees develop themselves and make the company a better place to work for. But lately, the activities of the group have either been very repetitive or unrelated to where we all started. Rarely have I seen people question why we host certain events or what we really want to achieve with them. Not to my surprise, the attendance of members themselves has drastically reduced at these functions.

Although we all have good intentions, the good hasn't been well-defined. There is no roadmap. There haven't been enough questions like "Why are we exactly here?"

Another story from one of my older employers-

One morning my boss called me and asked me to work on this so called extremely important assignment. The sense of urgency in his voice was very evident. I listened to him for a while and asked him only one question at the end. "Why do you want me to leave everything and work on this right away?"

His answer was, "Well, because my boss told me to do so. What would you do if your boss called you and said that something is urgent?"

I almost laughed before I said "I would ask her the reason behind the urgency!"Of course, I explained to him why what he thought was urgent was really not a big issue and we had a bit of a discussion over it.

Once again, no surprises! It turned out that the assignment wasn't an urgent one after all. Someone higher up panicked due to a customer complaint and it trickled down all the way to us lower beings. Many layers of people in between never asked the question – why?

It is so easy to go on auto-pilot sometimes that we forget which direction we are going in.

Anyway, if your boss is as good as mine, ask him why? If your family is as good as mine, question them why? And if you have been diligently working on something, definitely question yourself why? Don't ever lose sight of your goal!