I’ve been fighting a battle I knew I couldn’t win for the last couple years with a longtime colleague.
At times it’s gone from out and out aggression to being passive-aggressive – on both sides. We’ve both wasted hours and hours of time. One of us would spend hours changing something, and the other would spend hours changing it back. It was the most wasteful, inefficient thing I’ve ever been a part of, and it finally came to a head last week. My colleague and I were forced to talk about the problem one on one, and decided to try to address it the same way – by working together on the end product and seeing if we could come to some compromise.
I spent two hours today working with this colleague on mutually agreeable solutions. After that two hours, I realized something – neither of us are completely happy about the result. We both still think we’re right. We also both realize we can’t continue in the same fashion we have for the last couple years, so we came to the table in a spirit of compromise.
And with neither of us being completely happy, we came up with acceptable solutions. Within those acceptable solutions are flashes of brilliance, too, but nobody is completely happy with the overall product. But it’s done, and the war is over. And the waste is over. And our relationship has probably improved.
Sometimes done is better than perfect. And sometimes when nobody is happy, that’s okay.