Blog Post: Process Step 1: Just Pick Up the Phone Fer Cryin' Out Loud!

 Martha I. Finney, president and CEO of Engagement Journeys, LLC., helps companies attract and keep high-passion, high-performing talent. For a sample chapter from her new book, The Truth About Getting the Best From People, email her at Martha@marthafinney.com  For a complete collection of all her extended HR blog postings, including “Why I Love HR,” visit her site Paths to HR Greatness.

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Unfortunately, this story starts with me, and it’s not a pretty one. But this is a great lesson in how important it is to abandon process every now and then and just reach out human to human.  Here’s what happened:

For the last two years I’ve been writing and editing a three-volume bookset on (what else?) high-performance organizations and employee engagement. Many of the chapters have been contributed by thought leaders in the field. And so, it’s been, well, an interesting two years. Let’s just leave it at that. The result is stupendous, but the word “sausage” comes to mind when I think of what it took to get us to this place in time – a stack of edited manuscript pages over a foot tall on my dining room table. My job now is to double-check the copy editor’s changes and answer a query here and there. No biggee, at least in theory.

One of the chapters came in, brilliantly written by a star in her field (I’m so proud to have her in the line-up!), but with a collection of references that look more like, well, a “dog’s breakfast.” Disorganized, impossible to track, even thinking of how to describe how bad they are is too gross to even ponder, so I’ll just move on with the story.

 After three days of trading collegial emails with the contributor – who at first seemed totally willing to make the fixes herself – the process of getting the edited manuscript to her to fix began to feel impossible, even in this age of emails, faxes and FedExes. We got increasingly confused. And so the whole conversation fell down with a message from her to me this morning: “I’ll tell you what to do and you do the work.”   (That’s not exactly how she said it, but that’s basically how I received it, if you get my drift.)

 Hot dog! I think to myself. I get to be huffy! I get to be indignant! I get to plant a snooty foot in the ground, draw a line in the sand – I mean snow – and throw my nose up into the air and say something like, “Excuuuuuuuuuuse me?  Hello???? What do you think I am, an editorial assistant?” No. Not editorial assistant…I know: cobbler’s assistant!....No…something even better….I know: chamber maid! That’s it! “What do you think I am, a chamber maid?”  Yeah, that’s the ticket…that will drive the point home and show her what’s what. Well, at the very least, who’s who.

 But then, darn it, my inner adult took over, some calm inner voice that sounds annoyingly like my mother’s found its way into my mind. “You’ll regret that. Act like you’re in charge instead, why don’t you?” So I sent this contributor a calm email saying that if we can’t find a way to clean up these references, I’ll have to make the painful decision to delete the chapter. (Remember being a kid tromping around in your parent’s shoes? It sort of felt like that.)

I clomp down the hall in my scuffees and bulky blue terrycloth bathrobe and pour myself my first cup of coffee (see? All this is happening BC – before caffeine!). And then, oh my Gosh!, the phone’s ringing. I look at the little window on the handset, it’s her! So I put on my “how nice to hear from you” voice and cheerfully answer the phone.

She says, “I think we got our signals crossed.” I think to myself, “You don’t know the half of it, sister.” And my inner mother’s voice is saying, “Now, what did we just talk about?” But I ignore that (moms, sheesh) and focus on the phone call.

 Upshot: She’s doing the reference changes – cheerfully, I might add. (Which makes her eligible for the People’s Choice award, if you ask me.) We had just got tangled up in our own feet trying to sort this out via volleys of emails. And one simple phone call squared everything away. Everybody’s happy, nobody’s feelings are hurt, and the book project keeps chugging along down the track toward completion.

 At the same time this morning, I get an email from a reader in Spain who works in HR and internal communications for a large global company. He wants to know: Do I know of any processes that integrate HR with internal communications?  For a second I’m stumped – as we’ve already seen process isn’t exactly my native territory.

 Then I think, “Why do HR and internal communications need a process to “integrate” with each other?”  A process? A process? How is it that we’ve come to wrap basic decent human interaction with the gobbledy-gook of process?

 Just pick up the phone and make the call! Or walk down the hall. And say, “Hi…watcha doin’? Can I help?”

 Might want to leave the scuffees at home, though. Mom would approve.