Great Intentions

Photo c/o Unsplash

I can’t believe it’s been two months since Emmy and I published our inaugural. Let’s Work on Work Podcast.  For those of you who have subscribed and listened, thank you. For those of you who have not, you can do so here.

Our regular listeners (Hi John Hayes!) may be wondering what has happened to our weekly podcast. Creating content is relentless. It is an ambitious undertaking. I am in deep admiration of the daily podcasters because producing a weekly podcast requires discipline and commitment.

We did so well the first few weeks, and when I say us, I mean Emmy.  She edited and published and got everything working great. And all of this while both of us are working on our work too.  And then it happened.

Corruption. I’ll leave that right here for now.

No, not the kind you’re thinking of, the file got corrupted. At first, it didn’t seem like a big deal, the original data was still in existence, and Emmy, in her determined millennial way, tried everything she could to re-edit, re-save, re-do the file that we originally recorded.  And then last week, after almost a week of trying everything, I got the fateful call. “Mom. It’s gone. And it was a good one too." The topic was, all about TRUST.

My first thought was, “Of course it was a good one.” Then I thought about how ironic it was that the topic was trust. Because at some level, if I hadn’t trusted Emmy completely, our conversation could have quickly turned to BLAME.

Come on, admit it.  Some of you were going there.  There’s that darn millennial, even if you are her mom, she’s not backing things up, thinking she knows everything about technology, not having a plan B, probably wearing headphones and chewing gum while she was working on it, and so on and so on.  

I can see how you might go there, but we chose a different path.   

There is such a fine line between trust and blame.  And so often with millennials, it’s easy to give them your trust and then blame them when they don’t get the results you were expecting.  It’s why we need to provide feedback and communicate early and often on every crucial project we collaborate on with our multiple generations in the workplace.  

Emmy was communicating with me throughout the “Lost TRUST Corruption Crisis” as we now refer to it.  At the first sign of trouble, she called me to fill me in and gave me daily updates. She was confident that she could recover the file until she wasn’t.  And she was also formulating Plan B.

We had recorded the first six podcasts live, and for me, that was a great way to do it, to be able to feed off of each other’s energy and spontaneity.  However, Emmy assured me that most podcasts are recorded remotely, so she sent me the information on how to set up Skype to record remotely. I got out the microphone (the one that I had accidentally sent to STL instead of ATL).  

And this is where our second round of trouble started.

I will take full responsibility for the next series of events.  Emmy had taken full responsibility, established plan B, and then I pulled the classic baby boomer move, where I couldn’t get the technology to work, couldn’t get the microphone to work, and if you’re interested in hearing the results of all of that, click here.   For those of you who don’t have time to listen, there was a lot of “Mom. Mom. Moooom. Can you hear me? I can hear you."

That was when we decided to take a breath, regroup and wait until tomorrow, when we will be reunited and back in the coat closet together to re-record our podcast all about trust, and a few others, with a new and somewhat wiser perspective.

We’ll let you know how it goes.