When Communications Go Bad – No Good Deed Goes Unpunished

With Supper Clubs there are times when people get their feelings hurt. As with most things in life, the more people that are involved, the more chances for mis-communication. We had an excellent example a few years ago. One of the chronic problems with Supper Clubs is there are cancellations. When people cancel, there can be a chain reaction of difficulties: finding substitutes, changing dates, combining dinner parties, etc.

We had a supper club melt-down caused by cancelations and mis-communication. Our neighborhood Supper Club is quite large with 5 dinner parties going on a given night with 4 couples at each party. So with 40 people involved it can get complicated. Denise is a key leader in our club and does a masterful job of scheduling through difficulties. The rule in our club is that if you cancel it is up to you to find a substitute. We have a list of 30 or more subs so there is usually a good pool of alternates. If you have difficulty finding a sub it initially falls back to the host of the dinner party. When we are hosting and we have cancelations I look at it as a recruiting opportunity. The host can call in reinforcements from anywhere. I have been known to pull people in from work, the gym, golf course, or anywhere. My wife has accused me a pulling strangers off the interstate.

The night of the meltdown was caused by multiple cancelations. Denise as the de facto leader made a decision to consolidate dinner parties, as was the normal practice. An email was sent out explaining that one party was being eliminated. The hostess whose party was eliminated was new to the club and was very offended. Poor Denise thought she was doing the “Newby” a favor by solving the scheduling issue and saving the hostess from all the work involved with hosting. Newby felt that she being arbitrarily picked on. Email nasty-grams were sent and quite simply it got ugly. To be honest it was a case where email was the standard operating procedure, but simply does not work.

Communication rules to live by:

1. Never use email or text if any bad emotion is involved. If you are irritated don’t push send.
2. Face to face communication is best.
3. Direct phone contact is second best.
4. If you have two touches of telephone tag use text message to get a person to person meeting or call scheduled.
5. Voicemail is next best but dangerous.
6. Be really careful what you put in writing. Email and text can be great but you miss out on the chance to read your audience and adapt your message. Plus, they don’t go away and keep hordes of lawyer gainfully employed. The really bad thing about emails and texts is that people will write things that they would never say face to face.
7. Blogging is dangerous. Please note that I have broken just about every one of my “Rules” in writing this blog. Oh well…

At the end of the day it is hard to avoid miscommunication and feelings getting hurt. Common sense and sensitivity go a long way. Sometimes bad stuff just happens.