EXAMPLE CRITICAL INCIDENT
I recently had a situation at work where one of my customers was unhappy. I am in customer service and my company prides themselves on their ability to out service their competitors. Our competitors can produce as good quality product as we do but they can not deliver the level of customer service as we do. Thus, when a customer calls us with a complaint we take it very seriously. My problem was in relaying not only my customers' needs while at the same time trying to establish the root cause and hopefully preventing it from occurring again.
This seems, to me, to be a reasonable and logical task. However, when I presented it to my boss it wasn't received quite the way I intended it to be. Although I knew I would have a difficult time with selling the concept of getting to the root cause for future prevention. What has occurred in the past has been to fix the immediate problem then move on. However, to me this concept is a Band-Aid remedy. What I was proposing was to fix it permanently.
The problem is that I get very frustrated with him when I am trying to go further than what he and the company is accustomed to. I get defensive and argumentative. All I want is for him to see my point and for him to accept it as a reasonable and logical solution to a situation or problem. My point was to get him to think outside of his usual box, which is to take care of the immediate need, then move on. However, I did finally force him to go the extra step and be proactive and solution oriented. Of course, this was met with much resistance.
My question then becomes how can I better relay my thoughts and perspectives about a given situation or problem without becoming defensive and argumentative? Because when this occurs the real problem(s) seem to get lost in the emotion of the debaters. An awkward and tedious dance seems to occur, and then we stumble back to the problem at hand and finally decide on what to do.