A few years ago, I initiated a call to a coworker after learning that
she had felt that I didn't think she was very bright and that had led to
some defensiveness and aggressiveness in some of our interactions,
which I didn't really understand at the time.
But once I gained insight into this it all grew to make sense.
So, when I gave her the call, I immediately apologized and
let her know that this had come to my attention and
that I didn't want her to feel that this way.
It truly was not an accurate reflection of how I felt about her.
But I opened up the door to really understand more about how she felt and
how this had been the impacting our working relationship.
And what that did was it made me aware of so many other areas where
her feeling about this had bled into other parts of our working relationship.
i.e., her being a little more aggressive and defensive with me and
of course affecting our ability to get some work done.
So, once we had this conversation things changed dramatically and
I'll never forget her telling me that she thought it was very noble of me
to have made that phone call.
Throughout the call I made sure that when I apologized and
opened the door to have this conversation with her that there were no excuses.
I never said anything like, I'm really sorry that you felt this way,
I made you feel this way or that I was really stressed out and
sorry that things got kind of crazy.
I never said anything like that i just completely owned it.
And I said, I can see how I contributed to you feeling this way,
that wasn't right and
I want to make sure that moving forward you don't ever experience that with me.
It's open door for you to come to me anytime and say,
hey I didn't feel good about our last conversation.
Thankfully, once we had this conversation, the air was cleared and
things were fine after that.