All Of The People All Of The Time
Tue, November 1, 2011 | Post a Comment | 
Sometimes you just have to give them what you think is best. Life can't always be a democracy.When spending time with family and friends the following scene is repeated time and time again.
See if this sounds familiar…
“I’m hungry. Let’s go eat. Where would you like to eat?”
“I don’t care, anyplace is fine with me.””
“Anybody else have any favorites? Anyone? No? Are you sure?”
“We don’t care. It's all good. Let’s just go someplace”
“OK, I have an idea let’s go to …(insert the restaurant name of your choice)”
“Oh no, I hate that place. Last time I was in there…blah blah blah...”
“Well then how about…(restaurant #2)
“I was there last week and the service was terrible and two of us had to send back our steaks. I don’t want to go there.”
“Well how about…” (repeat ad nauseum)
This goes on and on with one after another shooting down every possibility launched until you get tired of it and pick a place yourself and say here’s where we’re going to go.
We had a similar situation show up in business.
Our manager, Bob Turley, decided to combine our Monday morning manager meeting with a breakfast. He thought it would be more fun for everyone. Of course he was buying. Should have been a great deal for us, wouldn’t you think?
But, no because there was another issue. It seems Bob, being the kind and nice guy that he is, decided he’d let us pick the time. Everyone wanted a time that would work great for them. Plus, some also had children to drop off at school and other obligations. Into this setting came Bob with the innocent question,”What time do you all want to meet?”
The answer to this question never came but we did go through about a six week period of changing from nine, to ten, to eleven, to Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and back to Monday again. This merry-go-round ended the morning it appeared we finally picked the perfect time.
It seemed like this issue was behind us.
We were all relieved. We had a great breakfast and meeting but as we were leaving, believe it or not, one knuckle-head actually said…”Bob, this was great but would you mind if next we moved the time back and started 30 minutes later?”
Bob underwent an instantaneous transformation into a business version of The Incredible Hulk. ”The manager breakfast is going to be every Monday at 9am from now on! I am sick and tired of trying to please you guys and if you’re not here at 9 I’ll fire your a**!”
It’s impossible.
As an observer of this series of events I realized more than ever that…you can’t please all the people all of the time.
Another way of saying the same thing is that…a surefire formula for failure is trying to please all of the people all of the time.
The moral of the story: When you’re in charge and working with others remember this—it’s great to be accommodating, but don’t expect everybody to agree because 99% of the time it’s not going to happen. It's not a big deal because its unavoidable.
Someone’s not going to be entirely happy with the choice and there’s no way to avoid it.
Do you go out of your way to try to please everyone on your team—and if so, are you happy with the results? What strategies do you use when you know there's no way everyone will be satisfied?