I’m washing my hands of this

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A while ago I worked for a while on a report for a client. It had a bunch of formulas, some complex SQL and some unique ways they needed the data presented.

When I sent the email to the team that requested the report, I was proud. I was confident it did what they wanted and they would be thrilled.

They replied a few minutes later thrilled to begin using the new report. It would save them hours of time during their end-of-month reporting.

Ahh. I thought to myself. Time to wash my hands of this one and move on to my next challenge.

Until they emailed me a week later with a bug they found.

Then again the next week with a revision request.

Then again three weeks later with a discrepancy in the numbers.

I was annoyed. They took my beautiful report and all my hard work and they started poking holes in it, changing the requirements, and gasp finding bugs.

Why was I annoyed?

I had embraced a broken theory of partnership. In my mindset, I had “won” by delivering the report, regardless of how useable or useful it was to the stakeholders. Mentally I had moved on from this report and considered a win which I delivered my part.

Underneath my annoyance was an attitude that believed I could be successful without the users being successful.

I could win regardless of whether they win.

But the partnership is the flip side of that. I win when you win. And I don’t win if you don’t win.

That fundamentally changed how I viewed that report and the stakeholders who kept emailing me. Now, I was in it for their success. And I’m not successful until they are.

I’m glad you are here,

Sawyer