Monday, March 12, 2007

Speaker phone etiquette

I was on a call with my boss in Texas today, and he put me on speaker phone. I assume because he needed his hands to type, or do something else. Good business etiquette would say that when someone puts you on speaker phone, if there are others in the room-they alert you to their presence.

Well, I was having a frustrating morning-too tight of a training schedule, complications with a clients install, and DST effecting other users acceptance of my meetings. And I was sharing the details with him. He asked me to perform a task which I thought was redundant and too time consuming for the limited time I had allotted this AM, so I hesitated and then responded by saying so. He explained his position, and I accepted. I also proceeded to explain my schedule for this morning, and the rest of the day to him so he knew where I was coming from.

Then in the back ground I hear one of the owners pipe up!!! Here I am talking away the to my boss, who i have a more casual relationship with than the owner... sharing things I wouldn't normally want the owner to know. Grrrr. It made me very frustrated. Not only did it make me feel silly, but angry.

Now, Jeff would say that anger is a secondary emotion and that I need to get to the heart of the anger--to the real emotion.

The real emotion feels like betrayal. My boss wants me to be forthcoming with him, and appreciates the amount of honesty we have. However, if you truly appreciated that you wouldn't put me in a position to regret being honest with you by allowing the owner to observe our interaction. And then call me after to say you noticed that I was upset when we spoke earlier.

I feel like I have 2 options--confront him about my feelings of betrayal based on the fact that we have a less professional relationship and therefore can be more honest with one another. Or, take our relationship back to a more professional one, removing some of the inherent trust that was present before.

Neither sound good right now. I am going to sit on it for a while, and let it marinate just in case I am acting overly emotional. The last thing i need is to act more the fool. Thoughts or suggestions are welcome.

1 comment:

maggafers said...

i'm late on chiming in, but i hope you gave it some time, but did eventually talk to your boss! let us know what happens...
(p.s. i love the word 'marinate'. i started using it after i saw "kissing jessica stein" :)