Just Be Patient!?

If you’ve ever been in a session where Cindy and I teach on communication and behavioral styles, you’ve likely heard me share that my dad has told me for years that I’d get more patient as I got older. So far though, only one of those two things have happened. When I tell that story in person, I ask folks from the groups we’re working with to guess which one and the gray hair seems to be a dead giveaway! In all seriousness though, I’ve just never been a patient person. I have a clear understanding today of how that ties back to my behavioral style but how long we have to wait on things from certain people does send a message as to how much (or how little) value they place on us…

The most common whipping post for excessive wait times seems to be the doctor’s office. I’ll circle back to that shortly. Before that though, consider a recent experience Cindy and I had with an attorney… Cindy’s dad passed away at the end of 2021 and she was named as the executor of his estate. I’ll spare you all the details but we’ve had to work with a few different lawyers through that process, which has only proven the statistic a friend shared with me years ago that 98% of them make the other 2% look bad. (I’ll let you know when I meet one who falls into the 2%!)

Cindy needed a specific expertise for one of the items she had to work through and we were pointed to someone. She contacted the office and waited over a week before following up. After another week passed without even a time being scheduled to talk with this attorney, she called again. We finally got something on the calendar to meet with him in person about a month after her initial outreach. We arrived at the practice a few minutes early and were escorted to a conference room. About 15 minutes after our scheduled appointment time, Cindy went to the desk to ask if we were there on the correct day, knowing full well that we were. He finally made his way into the room a few minutes later but was completely unprepared. Knowing he bills by the hour, I asked who we would be able to invoice for the time we had just lost waiting on him. He definitely wasn’t expecting that but I felt like he needed to understand one of my favorite lines from the 80’s metal band Jackyl’s song “I Stand Alone”... (I won’t share that here but I’d love to hear if you know what it is!)

Sounds kinda like the doctor’s office, huh? I actually found a few articles that suggested it was appropriate to ask how much longer the doctor would be if it was at least 20 minutes beyond the appointment time. For anyone to consider that acceptable, they’ve clearly never heard that line in the song I just referred to! For someone to expect me or you to be on time and still be OK with them being late tells me they just don’t value us; they see their time as more important than our time! And even if that’s not what they really believe, it’s still the message they’re sending…

What about communication since that’s what I started all this with? I found a really interesting article called Response Time In The Internet Age: How Long Is Too Long? that shared all kinds of statistics about emails, text messages, voicemails, and more, then broke each down by the relationship we have with the individual and whether or not it was during business hours. While I found it interesting that they detailed all of those things out, my point here is that the longer we take to respond the more likely it is that the person we’re interacting with doesn’t feel valued. That matters in our personal relationships and it matters with the teams we’re responsible for leading. Next time, we’ll look at one simple thing that can help avoid sending a message that we don’t value someone…