The Campbell Academy Blog (231)

Unexpected contact

Why do some people get this and some people seemingly not?

Throughout the process of building the new practice (which I suppose seems to be all I write about at the moment) there are people involved in this who seem to understand the benefits of personal contact and people who actively shy away from personal contact when, in fact, it is the only solution to problems that are occurring.

Out of the blue I received a voicemail on my phone this week from the Managing Director of the building company.

We’ve never spoken before (he is relatively new in post) but I have heard his name and I have heard that he is a good guy.

At the start of this project, I met the Chief Executive of the company because they had a CEO and an MD, but I never expected to meet those guys again because they’re not building this and they’re not involved on a day to day basis and they’re busy running the company.

The purpose of the call from the MD was to just ask if I was ok.

It was just a touch base, or as the Americans call it in such a horrible fashion “to reach out”.

It is bizarre how such a personal conversation can just smooth over some of the little rough edges that occur during a complex process such as this or something unexpected and just really nice, removes the sterile aspects of the whole project and makes it two humans working together.

The same thing happened at the big project meeting last week. That is when we got the bad news that the project was pushed back a few weeks, but actually the person responsible for having to push the project back, spoke to me and looked me in the face and apologised and said that they were desperate to make sure that when we got this back it was absolutely right and his status reputation on the fact that there would be no more delays.

It is quite clear he is working as hard as he can to make this work and what more can I ask?

This comes against other people who have made colossal mistakes in the project which have cost huge amounts of money and have not and will not speak to me.

Chris Barrow once taught me “all problems exist in the absence of a good conversation”.

Never a truer word…