Learning and Educating is the essence of professionalism….
And arriving at a level of knowledge where you are able to recognize when you need learning and when the person that you are dealing with needs education calls for experience… both broad and deep!
What could demand more of you than to be able to make that determination is the level-headedness, the calm, the confidence and the tact in conveying the fact that the one you are dealing with needs that education!
And most importantly, the awareness of the variables that you are dealing with….
The Hard Values: The technical variables, the financial figures, the sales numbers, demographics, diagnostic reports, and the like that are in question in that particular scenario….
The Empirical Values: Historical data from which you can draw trends and inferences…. When a, b, c and d occur, you can expect k, l and m, type knowhow given past history…. predictive analysis, so to speak!
The People that are involved: Many issues are simply the result of who is complaining or who meddled with the system to cause the issue… It can be mind boggling, how so many big sounding issues are actually trivial! It may just be that the guy deciding to make the most noice simply does not want to let you rest!
The Business Variables: What is the the business really asking for? What is the expected outcome? What is the impact? What is the risk? Are we even solving the right problem? And does this problem even need to be solved!
I have found that when someone’s making you run around to lookup too many variables or is over-simplifying a complex problem, you are dealing with a person that needs education….
Being a thorough Professional really means that you make the erstwhile effort to listen, understand, look, determine, learn and/or educate, and/or solve in a manner that is constructive….
Being a thorough Professional also means that you determine whether the problem can even be fixed or should even be fixed given who you are dealing with, for many a time, it may not be about that problem at all!!!
Learn! Educate!! Be a thorough-bred Professional!!! Succeed!!!
