Operational Efficiency Has Its Downfalls
One of the things I love about growing a business is that we’re able to help more people as a team than any one individual could do in a days work.
We create systems, measure and track performance with great detail, and still… the inevitable happens: Exceptions are not made when they should have been made.
Sometimes our own efficiency and technological innovations gets in the way of ‘doing the right thing’ even when it means breaking one of our own rules to do the right thing.
This week, a top (and I mean TOP or very influential) author had his article rejected by one of our Associate Editors for violating one of our editorial guidelines.
I wonder why it is that even after all of the good (99% of the benefit of having a team), I sit here contemplating the damage done by the 1% of the time (if that) when we screw up a relationship or nick it a bit unnecessarily due to our operational efficiency when we needed to be customer intimacy based in this case.
End result is that the good outweighs the bad when it comes to the value of having a team behind the scenes here at EzineArticles.com vs. a few individuals trying to do it all.
My goal is to push us further into operational efficiencies and to add more crosschecks or feedback loops (in this case, the feedback loop was the author comment as he deleted his article after it was rejected by one of our editors) to capture as many problems to be handled by our Managing Editor.
It seems to me that when one is told that they’ve violated a rule, one should just swallow their ego, step back and survey their actions.
And if one desires to maintain a positive reciprocal relationship with said group by whom said rule was violated, maybe one can come up with a workaround or compromise that will meet the needs of said individual while also matching the requirements of the organization.
I’m sure that it wasn’t pleasant or an easy decision to “draw the line” with a top author who is likely a friend of EzineArticles.com.
Now, has the author considered that it’s not worth sabotaging this great ongoing relationship over one small incident? And that maybe it would be better to find an alternate route that respects the guidelines this website has put in place?
I would think that it’s probably not worth getting in a muddle over and if I were this person I’d try to write my article in a different way, submit in a different format, or adjust my thinking.
But that’s just me, and of course, I don’t know the exact situation.
Dina
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