crumpets
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quote:
ORIGINAL: UllrsIshtar
It speaks exactly to the point:
Your behavior is rude. Period.
OK. I get what you're saying, since I have never not been called a bull in a china shop when something needed to get done.
That's why I was best being in charge of skunk-works engineering projects.
Management always brought me in to build an alternative approach to a complex issue, or, to fix the latest debacle.
My meetings with management were of the sort where they told me to just get the job done, and to let them worry about the personnel repercussions.
So, let's all agree that my working style is, shall we term it plainly, as rude.
Now that we agree on my working style, we can get to the point of the folks are are "always" late to a run-of-the-mill personal meeting.
Your point is that they are, likewise, of a meeting style we shall call "rude".
On the other hand, for the folks who are almost always on time, even for a non-critical meeting of just one other person, we shall assume they have a working style of "polite".
Fair enough.
The issue STILL boils down to a difference in working styles.
Specifically, the working style of how two people approach the concept of the timing of a decidedly non-critical personal event.
The more flexible so-called "rude" people approach the concept of the START TIME of a non-critical personal meeting wholly DIFFERENTLY than the rigid so-called "polite" people do.
Remember, we're not talking about a press conference, or a meeting with the chairman of the board.
We're all talking about a decidedly non-critical run-of-the-mill event such as the meeting of two people for a personal meeting that, to one, may have no definite start and ending time, while, to the other, may have a definite start and ending time.
The way two people approach the same thing can be wholly different - where the more rigid and highly inflexible the person, the more they tend to complain about the terms of a specific affronting act, while the more flexible and understanding the person, the more they'll concentrate on the entirety of the overall meeting.
quote:
ORIGINAL: UllrsIshtar
Your position is that the entire world has to adapt to you, and that your behavior, no matter how destructive to others, is all right, because you happen to be a certain type.
That, my dear, is the very essence of rudeness.
As you noted, there are fundamentally two types of people in this world.
Those who understand that other people have different working styles, and those who don't.
We're not writing a PhD thesis here, so, we'll just refer to the former flexible person as "rude" and the latter rigid person as "polite", for our limited purposes here in this thread, surprising at that may sound to you.
The "P" type flexible person, who understands this concept that people approach the same things wholly differently, makes "rude" use of the various ways people approach the same task, while the inflexible person, who generally is clueless about such behavioral preferences because they are so rigidly boxed in by their own "J" type polite minds, has no concept of the difference.
The two types of people may approach the same task in wholly different ways.
For example, I once was handed a small skunk-works team of a dozen people, roughly half of whom were in each category above. The half that was inflexibly rigid were always on time, in essence, while the flexible half often had reasons for being wildly off timing.
Since this was a skunk-works team, our major task was an offshoot of the company's goals, but, because we had developed expertise in certain areas, we were OFTEN called upon to save critical projects from failure by augmenting those teams to meet a deadline.
Almost invariably, whenever another division head came to me with a proposal to save their teams, I would assign the FLEXIBLE half of my team to the role, while keeping the RIGID members of the team on their original task.
The flexible members of the team (i.e., the "P" types) could easily HANDLE the extreme disruption of being pulled off a task, essentially after a simple phone call to them at home during dinner, and having to start a wholly NEW TASK abruptly, to meet a midnight deadline so-to-speak, that someone else had missed. Often that meant a trip to Canada in the morning, or a day or two later, with a followup visit to France which may have taken place during their wife's birthday or their wedding anniversary, etc. (all of which they considered flexible).
Often these suddenly new deadlines we volunteered to meet were only days or weeks away, so the FLEXIBLE people had to drop everything, and start on the new task, and then, when done, they easily wholly switched gears picked up where they left off on their old tasks (often with the RIGID members of the team slowly having held up their inevitably lost slack to meet original deliverables due in the interim).
Knowing the working styles of the RIGID people (i.e., the "J" types), I wouldn't dare disrupt the rigid "J" types, who couldn't handle the stress. I called these "J" types, jokingly, the "factory workers". They cared more about the schedule, than the task.
Again, different people approach the same task differently, depending on their working style, just as the OP and his paramour approached the same task of the meeting differently with respect to the start and stop time.
In my example above, the rigid "J" types just wanted to plod along doing what they were doing without disruption, and there is a place for that type of employee.
These rigid "J" type people complained like hell whenever they were disrupted and called to jet off to Boston in the morning to solve someone else's problems.
They used to tell me that someone else not meeting their deadline was not their problem.
I understood. So, I didn't assign THEM disruptive tasks.
They appreciated me better, and I got more work out of them as a result.
I assigned the disruptive tasks to the "P" types who could more easily handle the disruption.
Mind you, my skunk-works team won award after award, where we accomplished things that nobody else could (of course, skunk works teams in large companies are of different types of very effective highly maneuverable teams).
I remember one specific achievement was saving Services' ass when they MISSED a promised Marketing deadline, which their huge Services program management team had methodically planned out to take six months.
We, on the other hand, used "wet-finger" planning, which is to say we estimated, on the fly, how long it would take, and then added or removed as much slack as we thought was needed as a plus-or-minus addendum, and that, my dear, was our schedule.
One day, the VP of Marketing came to me (I was a Director in Engineering) and explained, privately, that the Services Division was about to miss an important-to-Marketing deadline which, at that time, was only a month away. We didn't even bother to ask permission of my management (they usually left me alone to make my own decisions, so, it was a normal thing for my team to not confer with upper management in my own hierarchy).
This service group was well known for containing TONS of "J" type program managers, but it was woefully deficient of "P" type engineering workers.
So, all they could do was plan. And plan they did. They had wonderful plans. Lovely stuff. They had SOWs, and BOMs, and pretty Gant charts and the like.
But clearly, they had an execution problem. (To their credit, theirs was a complicated business decision, as usual, since Marketing needed the work done in order to tout their recent marketing campaign, but Services was incentivized by dollars per day, so, they had the factory-worker pay-by-day mentality - neither of which is wrong - both are right - but that's why Services missed Marketing's deadline).
On the other hand, we, in Engineering, are very used to getting things done. All the time. We overcome obstacles every single day.
So, what I did was I took the FLEXIBLE (P-type) half of the team, and told them to immediately drop everything, and to begin this new task, which, in only one month after the Services deadline was missed, was COMPLETED by our skunk-works Engineering team (remember, the "J" type program managers forecast it to take six months!).
The flexible (P type) team members worked till the wee hours of the morning, for weeks, to meet our stated goal, since I had told the Marketing folks it would take my skunk-works team about six weeks to accomplish what any Services group forecast would take them six months (we often used that ratio - and it held up, rather well over time).
I used the RIGID members of the team to maintain the ORIGINAL goals, where I only slowly added on them the most critical tasks that were being temporarily dropped, and they didn't complain too much (as they understood).
I can give scores of examples of how to build an effective team, using, to the team's advantage, the fact that people have different working styles, but that is just one of them (ask me some day to explain why none of our ad-hoc staff meetings had an ending time and why our staff meetings were never on a periodic schedule, but always scheduled on a case-by-case basis).
quote:
ORIGINAL: UllrsIshtar
Precisely because they expect the entire rest of the world to cater to their personality traits, no matter how destructive, instead of trying to find a middle ground.
Up until now you have been wholly correct, in that my working style is termed, by many others, as "rude" (and brutally effective at getting things done), which bruises the styles of some others (whom we simply brush aside like water flowing around obstacles).
But here, you are only partially correct.
Do you think the Services team had nice things to say about us taking over their role, and getting done in six weeks what they had forecast to take six months?
We joked that the way we got things done that nobody else could was that we flowed around obstacles instead of trying to get the people to do THEIR jobs. Whenever someone didn't do their job, instead of trying to find a "middle ground", we simply flowed around them.
We did their job, for them, and we got the credit, not them. Yet, we also were the brunt of the bruised egos we left in our wake. It goes with the territory of such "rude" (but effective) people.
We met their politely missed deliverables, not them.
We accomplished things with our tiny (rude) skunk works team that (polite) teams ten times the size of ours could never accomplish.
Sometimes there is no room for the polite "middle ground".
Sometimes you need a bull-in-a-china shop type skunk-works team.
Again, different ways of approaching the same task aren't better or worse. They're just different.
They both have their separate pros and cons.
And you have to KNOW the differences, in order to make effective use of their different working styles.
In the case of the OP's personal meeting, the difference in meeting-time styles is readily apparent.
We, of course, don't hear the other side of the story, which, for all we know, could be that she cared more about the personal OUTCOME of the meetings, than the trivial (to her) starting time.
quote:
ORIGINAL: UllrsIshtar
Being a certain type of person isn't the issue people are calling you out on as being rude. Your refusal to cooperate with others, and accommodate the fact that other people are different types is.
Again, you speak wisdom, but you come to the wrong conclusion.
They often call upon people like me to fix problems that take a style which I will say the Israeli's love, but the Japanese hate.
After my first visit to Japan to solve a critical problem, I told them I'd prefer to go to Israel instead.
In Japan, we had to DEFER to authority. We even had to sit in the meeting room according to the hierarchy of the customers. We did that whole business-card thing of respect, and we were told to never say no and to never commit to iffy deadlines. As a result of this (and many other factors), we got almost nothing done in the formal meetings in Japan. All the work was done after copious beers, after hours, and even then, we were always warned not to bruise people's fragile egos (I had never been warned so much as when I traveled to Shin-Yokohama and Tokyo). Jesus. The Japanese have petty egos.
On the other hand, the Israelis LOVED us. They called us back time and time again. Whenever we caused a ruckus (again, usually when we were called upon to deliver something that other teams couldn't deliver), the management team just smiled and told me to keep on doing what we were doing.
Mind you, we were cocky. I don't know if that comes through here, but we were as confident as hell that we could accomplish anything we agreed to do. As an Engineering team, it was unusual that we didn't even HAVE a program manager. I used that req to hire another engineer. We didn't use PowerPoint. We used napkins. We didn't have weekly staff meetings. We all crowded into any office of any person who willingly or unwillingly, needed to get something done for us. Since these are complex tasks, we needed the entire company, and, since we considered half the company an obstacle, we used the other half to get the job done (i.e., it wasn't worth "meeting in the middle" because it took more time to convince them to do their job than it took for us to get their job done for them).
Bear in mind I had this skunk-works role for five years (which is nearly an eternity in Silicon Valley startup days where a company goes from ten people to five thousand in those same five years). So we weathered a LOT of management teams, and back-and-forth management styles (Dilbert was, of course, always right on target).
Bearing in mind I ran a skunk-works team (which is a special type of "green berets" in corporate insertion raids), making effective use of the different personality styles required, first and foremost, RECOGNIZING that people treat the same concept differently.
Just as do people who are considered "always late" to a run-of-the-mill personal meeting, versus people who would always be on time even for the trivial'est of personal meetings between just two individuals.
< Message edited by crumpets -- 9/27/2015 5:24:48 AM >
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RE: How To Handle People Who Are Always Late? - 
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