Anonymous
I recently had to onboard 20 directors and managers to financial resource planning system to prepare for 2025 budget
I organized training session where we invited new users as well as those who used the system before.
At the onset of the session , one of the managers, Joe, vocally criticized the forecasting system. He especially hit on leverage of Excel for data entry. He shared his frustration about entering numbers in Excel and requested to rebuild the system. I faced difficult situation where new directors were given negative messages that do not add confidence to the task they were expected to do.
My task was to address his concerns while staying focused on preparing the forecast for 2025.
I considered few options: from sharing that this is not a forum for feature requests, to shifting focus to task at hand and overriding his speech with message about budget that we try to prepare.
I chose an approach where I shared difference between situation of Joe with everyone else's.
Joe has large org of over 30 engineers with frequent employee changes. That causes a lot of data updates. The new managers have typically 3- 5 employees in the team and the employees stay for years.
I acknowledged the message from Joe, and offered to get back to him. With that I offered a live demo online training for everyone else so they can see for themselves how to enter the data. That helped the team to be 50% ready at the end of the training.
Deflating the situation was only half of the task. A few days later I reached to Joe to reflect on the situation.
I shared that first of all he is heard. I asked a lead engineer in my team A to work with Joe on implementation plan. After that I said that his message made it very difficult for the new team members to get ready for the budget. Joe's request is at least 6 months to 9 months long while we needed the budget in 10 days.
As result Joe saw how the situation looked from point of view of new managers. He felt apologetic, but I smiled and told him that its OK and we will be good friends . Finally we not only retained good working relationships , strengthened by this moment but I was also able to help new managers to get ready for the 2025 budget.
In retrospect it would be beneficial to review attendees before the meeting and pre-work the possible situation. That will be a good learning for the future.
