Pressure
Recently, I had an employee who quit because the job had too
much pressure. Since then, I have tried to understand his position
better. Why was he laying awake at night thinking about his job?
Why did pressure drive him off to greener pastures where presumably,
there would be less pressure? Why does pressure or fear of failing
drive people away.
First, I looked at his position. His job was to process the
outbound shipments here at RentQuick. To my mind, processing
outbound shipments is an easy job since you have total control.
You only need to put the right labels on the right units to be
delivered on the right days.
Where was the pressure? No one was yelling at him. The job is
quietly handled without any real time stress. In fact, the only
pressure I could locate is the fear of failure. He was worried
that shipping the wrong thing to the wrong place would get him
into trouble.
Meeting planners face this all the time. How many of you have
lay awake at night worried that the property selected was wrong
for the event, or that you mistakenly planned for a dinner of
200 when it was really 250? Pressure comes from feeling like
you are about to fail or that you missed something.
Dealing with pressure is the key to success in any meeting planner's
life. Here is how it works. The pressure we all feel is really
our gut telling us we screwed up. You know that feeling. You
feel it when you leave the house for vacation and fear that you
left the iron on or something.
When that feeling hits, you need to feed it so it will go away.
Feeding that anxiety is as simple as double checking your own
work. For the vacation, it means going around the house and making
sure everything is off. For a shipping manager, it means double-checking
each order to ensure it is correct. And for a meeting planner,
it means reviewing every detail to be sure it is correctly planned
for.
Meeting planners also need to have contingency plans. If there
is a problem, fine. Now, how do you fix it so your customer is
properly served? We do this all the time at RentQuick. Problems
come up and there is a solution out there somewhere. Focusing
on the failure doesn't help until the problem is solved. Then
you go back and review what went wrong.
Everything you and we do is based on cause and effect. Every
problem had a cause. A great way to eliminate the pressure you
feel is to identify the source of your problems and change your
actions before they cause problems.
