Too Many Cooks - Using the Wrong Ingredients
Topic: Quirps1
Okay, here's a question. Why are people surprised when they get a messed up end-product after having had too many hands involved?

Here's an example: An attorney [Cook Number 1] is working on finalizing the changes to a legal document which must be sent out by the end of the day on Monday. His regular assistant [Cook Number 2] leaves around 5:30 p.m., having put in a long day on the project. The law firm has both a document processing department and reserve administrative assistance to assist in late night projects; a list is sent to document processing [Cook Number 3] so that an e-mail distribution list can be set up for the reserve assistant [Cook Number 4] to use later on that evening. The reserve assistant must catch a train at 8:00 p.m., and the project still is not complete, so another assistant [Cook Number 5] goes to the desk to make final changes to the document and send out the e-mail.

No one should be surprised to hear that the document did not get e-mailed to all of the right people. And that's without knowing that it turned out that there were two distribution lists; the one created that night, and one already maintained by the regular assistant. Both lists had almost the same name; one was called "ListName" and the other was called "ListName Distribution List."

But behind this nonsense, all of the cooks ended up creating a long, convoluted, crazy mess; the attorney, who was the one person involved throughout the entire crazy relay of the process is the one person no one will say has any responsibility; so the assistants were left, some pointing their fingers and others expressing their anger, trying to identify where the problem occurred.

Anger has no place in the workplace. At the very least, it's kind of like tears (and most other emotional responses) in a personal relationship: feelings serve the function that pain does to your body - let's you know when something needs to be acted upon. A friend wrote me "...Anger is personal, involves insults, etc...A person can be pleased or displeased about a project..." - but if they express anger, they've gone to a personal place, and it behooves them to have a good reason.

The only place anger might possibly be appropriate in this situation is at the attorney, and at the firm itself for having an extremely poor understanding of how you should structure a relay team work environment.