Source: TODAY'S TMJ4 - Soldier Wants Direct Apology
...in the e-mail, the Discount-Mats.com employee wrote (to a soldier who asked if they could ship a product to his unit based in Iraq), "...we would NEVER ship to Iraq. If you were sensible, you and your troops would pull out of Iraq."
At this point, adding my outrage to the bunch who effectively shut down the discount-mats.com business would be akin to kicking the proverbial dead-horse. The lesson I take from this is, how do we identify and address flippant attitudes like this in our own workplace? And to constructively address those attitudes before they manifest in ways that would do damage to our business -- or worse, to our customers -- in a way that still maintains respect for the differences in opinion? Hmmm, maybe there's a starting point: "respect."
A number of years back, I had a manager who made it a regular agenda item in our weekly status meetings to discuss topics outside of the immediate project. I call it the "getting along" agenda item. It wasn't written that way, but that's the gist. She always made time to make that dialog a key part of the meeting. It was a nice respite from the status updates, project milestones, issues lists, project risks, and so on.... Always, somewhere before we concluded, there'd be this, "... so what else, how're we all doin'...?"
Just from the force of the team culture she was able to nurture, we all understood this didn't just mean "...in the job" or "...in the project." It was great. It became that one little catch-all part of the meeting where we could talk about anything from what movie I saw last Friday night to issues of team communications, team dynamics and attitudes. Just as importantly, it was an opportunity for her to lead by example. In those meetings, I'd venture to say many of us learned not only about how to conduct meetings but also how to keep group dynamics positive.
Yeah. Go figure, a conscious effort to formalize the role of communicating about communicating. Or thinking about how we think.
A public letter on Discount-mats.com's home page indicates they're essentially shut-down. At least for the time-being. In case they shut it down permanently, or decide at some point in the future that it's safe to come out of the rabbit hole again and change their home page letter, here's a PDF. (Download discountmatsltr.pdf)
I'm taking my copy and clip-booking it so it serves as a reminder that, contrary to the owners' wishful statement: "We want to re-iterate that we should not be held liable for the personal views of members within our company any longer...", the fact is, at least in the eyes of our customers, we are.
-mva
