Why Your Colleagues do Odd Things
When I started my first job after grad school and was finally making a bit of money, I bought my friend a birthday card from Papyrus. It was the first card I’d ever purchased from the store. There wasn’t a store like that where I grew up, so I wasn’t familiar with their cards either.
Inside its greeting cards, Papyrus includes a small piece of paper that has an inspirational, yet essentially marketing, blurb. At the time it was about their symbol, the hummingbird, so I glued the piece of paper inside the left flap of the card in order to include the message they’d written.
Looking back, I laugh, but I also feel a twinge of embarrassment that I did this. My friend must have thought it was quite bizarre. Why is Liz pasting Papyrus’ marketing message in my birthday card?!
Yet, I can tell you why I did such an odd thing, with innocence and inspiration, I might add.
I was missing the context.
Because this was my first purchase at Papyrus, I simply didn’t know this piece of paper was an extra tidbit they included in all their cards. Now, if I had stopped to think about it, I might figured it out and saved myself the embarrassment. But I didn’t stop to think about it because I didn’t know I needed to.
This story connects directly to innocent, maybe even inspired, things that your people do that are just a little odd or off-track. They are simply not seeing the bigger picture. They are therefore not seeing how their little piece of the puzzle fits into the big picture and how it connects with the other puzzle pieces.
The good news: this is a relatively easy fix for you as the leader. You simply share more context. You don’t roll your eyes at the oddball, out-of-left-field actions, you pull the employee aside and share more about where their work sits in the bigger landscape.
Some examples of what missing context might look like:
Sending a report but leaving out important stakeholders.
Planning a meeting agenda without appreciation for strained relationships that will be in the room together.
Not being able to fully follow along in a meeting and then making an unhelpful suggestion because they had been told to speak up more during their performance review.
Providing your direct report feedback on poor performance without realizing what they have going on at home.
Making an important strategic decision without considering the marketplace.
Do you have any examples of the cost of missing context? I would love to hear them!
