Taking Personal Responsibility to new lows.

Ralph Cramden wrote:

Lantley wrote:
Ralph Cramden wrote:

I have sat patiently by and watched the millennial and X gens come into the commercial construction industry as they graduated college, and took over management positions from the old school people. One thing most of them have in common is a distinct lack of having a set of stones for any conversation, either face to face or on the phone, when it comes to business dealings. If it's the slightest bit confrontational forget it. Now they have a large set of stones when it's an email, but they melt in a face to face conversation. And if you leave a voicemail over an issue that does not benefit their position in some way, most likely you'll never get a return call. That's the rule more than the exception IME.

THat's a fine observation. But when you started there was no email or voice mail.Everything was done face to face.
Your like a cowboy stating that these cars are whizzing around too fast. You want your horse back.
If you had Email available I imagine you would treat it much like everyone does today!
Are behavior is not unique.It did not form from thin air. It evolves from previous generations.

I want my horse back ? LOL......

I use email every day in a construction or business setting and have done so since the mid 90's. I probably recieved 250 yesterday and sent close to 100. You missed the point. Email is not a replacement for a good old fashioned conversation, especially where problems or issues are concerned. When the horse I am wanting walks on to a jobsite and will not move out of the way, I bet I could get it out of there a lot quicker than sending an email. That email then gets forwarded around for two days with everybody and their brother added or copied, and nobody has yet to make a decision to pull out the Glock and let the horse have it in the noggin.

If some of the current crop of people in the industry spent as much time talking about solving a problem, as they do sending emails around and figuring out who they can blame the problem on and then backcharge them for it, they would not have had the problem to begin with.

Anytime I've ever had to deal with a bad situation with a sub or vendor in which we had to get a lawyer involved (less than handful of times in 15+ years), one of the first questions always is "did you put it in writing". Hard to put a verbal interaction into writing. Now on the other hand, we might have a conversation prior to or shortly after an email just to discuss it. But since this perceived indirect form of communication goes both ways, sometimes you have to send an email or leave a salty voicemail in order to illicit a phone call. For example, we couldn't get a very certain power company (public utility) to return our phone calls or emails. So we sent them an email (copied everyone) and told them we were going to dig right next to their primary pole and that since no one would advise us, we couldn't guarnatee that the pole wouldn't fall over. Within minutes, we got a phone call from an upper level supervisor.