Yesterday was the perfect storm of communication fails at my office. It seemed like all the interlocking pieces we have in place decided to take a minute to break into separate groups, completely re-work ideas then re-joined each other assuming everyone else knew about these sudden changes even without notification.
As I've talked about numerous times, I work for a small staff association (there are seven of us managing a national membership network of over 5,000). We fly out to our national conference in two weeks and on top of that we're currently doing a complete web overhaul. The deadlines we have right now are can't miss and numerous so, as expected, so are the small fires that pop up through the normal work day.
Since we're a small staff, we depend on a lot of outside the office help to get things done. Whether it's from our volunteer leaders, Board of Directors, outside vendors or our member pool at large; it's important for us to have that extra support structure to make sure our office doesn't turn into a scene from Wall Street circa 1929 or 1987. So we do and nine times out of 10 we're happy with the process. Yesterday was not that case. Our awards guy had missed our 'this is the day we need this or we're screwed' deadline, our event consultant had assumed I was working on something I had no idea about, our exhibitor management consultant was expecting designs from me I had no idea about, even staff was expecting things from me that I didn't know was on my plate. On top of that it was a webinar day so I already had 30 minutes blocked to do new speaker training and another 90 minutes for the actual webinar. It was the perfect storm of communication breakdowns.
At times like this I'm glad I spent the start of my career in a public relations agency. Controlled chaos is the name of the game there so, minus a few angry tweets, the day slowly smoothed itself out. How did we handle it? I made a list of all the things that had to be done, took care of what I could and handed off assignments I knew didn't need my full attention to their respective areas. We were able to find workarounds for some things and solutions for the others. By the time I left yesterday, all the cogs in the machine were working together again. It was a day of panic that could have gone either way, but because of the awesome support structure we have here, it went alright.
When there's a communications breakdown at your job, how do you handle it?
I'm Joe.