Creative Reaction

“People can tame all kinds of animals, birds, reptiles, and fish, but no one can tame the tongue.”

Some great advice over at Harvard Business Publishing. If you want to get along with (and keep) your clients, you need to develop a habit of thinking carefully before replying to barbed words.

The advice applies to pretty much any interaction; co-workers, managers, spouses, even TSA at the airport. A few years back on a return trip, a TSA employee  was giving me a hard time as he held up a Ziploc containing three toiletry items. “This is a gallon-sized bag”, said the agent. I said nothing; he was right. I knew I should have used a quart-sized bag, but I didn’t have any when I was packing. I almost interjected that TSA didn’t give me any trouble on the initial leg of my journey. And the items did meet the size & weight requirements. Again he said, “This is a gallon-sized bag”. I kept silent. Perhaps I was simply tired after a long week, but I just stood there looking at him. I refused to argue with him. I glanced over at his colleague for moral support. It worked. He waved me through and the first agent let me continue.

What you really want to say will usually make things worse. Hold your tongue. Reply with kindness and watch the tension melt away.

Not sure of the appeal of this, as it largely has to do with local sports, though an emotional story nonetheless.

Buckner receives warm reception from Fenway faithful. Many Red Sox fans & members of the media have blamed Bill Buckner for single-handedly loosing the 1986 World Series for the Red Sox, despite the fact that baseball is a team sport and the “body” of his work speaks for itself.

Life is simply too short to hold grudges; they are like a cancer, or voluntarily wearing shackles. Bigger people forgive. Be Big.

“Any fool can criticize, condemn and complain – and most fools do. But it takes character and self-control to be understanding and forgiving.” -Dale Carnegie

It seems few people today realize that Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People, written in 1936, details in hundreds of anecdotes how management skills and “people skills” were leveraged by some of the richest men of that era.

One of the principles that struck me was that truly great people easily forgive. A passage from the book:
“Sincere appreciation was one of the secrets of the first John D. Rockefeller’s success in handling men. For example, when one of his partners, Edward T. Bedford, lost a million dollars for the firm by a bad buy in South America, John D. might have criticized; but he knew Bedford had done his best – and the incident was closed. So Rockefeller found something to praise; he congratulated Bedford because he had been able to save 60 percent of the money he had invested. ‘That’s splendid,’ said Rockefeller. ‘We don’t always do as well as that upstairs.’”
(Of course, in 1936, a million dollars represented considerably more money than it does today.)

Another quote from the book:
“A great man shows his greatness,” said (Thomas) Carlyle , “by the way he treats little men.”

But this tops them all!
“Bob Hoover, a famous test pilot and frequent performer at air shows, was returning to his home in Los Angeles from an air show in San Diego. As described in the magazine Flight Operations, at three hundred feet in the air, both engines suddenly stopped. By deft maneuvering he managed to land the plane, but it was badly damaged although nobody was hurt.

Hoover’s first act after the emergency landing was to inspect the airplane’s fuel. Just as he suspected, the World War II propeller plane he had been flying had been fueled with jet fuel rather than gasoline.

Upon returning to the airport, he asked to see the mechanic who had serviced his airplane. The young man was sick with the agony of his mistake. Tears streamed down his face as Hoover approached. He had just caused the loss of a very expensive plane and could have caused the loss of three lives as well.

You can imagine Hoover’s anger. One could anticipate the tonguelashing that this proud and precise pilot would unleash for that carelessness. But Hoover didn’t scold the mechanic; he didn’t even criticize him. Instead, he put his big arm around the man’s shoulder and said, ‘To show you I’m sure that you’ll never do this again, I want you to service my F-51 tomorrow.’”

Our work environments could be vastly better places if we learned from this example.