How To Manage Disappointment In Business

Disappointment Can Become Very Ugly

Certainly the business world has grown up into this larger than expected set of complicated systems to manage daily.  The business world has also become increasingly demanding for processing added requirements in order to compete well.  We live in complicated times.  No business owner would disagree with these developments.  Our time has become very demanding and very slippery to navigate well.  Costly mistakes appear out of nowhere, sometimes more often than we care to admit.  Doing business in today's world can be some trying stuff.

Now add to this set of truths the wreckage of a poor economy and we have a tough recipe to place on our plate of responsibilities.  Every business owner who reads this kind of stuff can easily relate.  They have felt the negative pinch of all of these things in their recent years of business management.  Many of them still carry the current scars.

Disappointment has become a steady part of the business owners routine diet.  Downtown regions have suffered collectively in many local areas.  Mall consumer traffic in other regions has dropped off significantly.  Consumer activities have dwindled in many other areas of business design.  Online retailers are not producing the increases necessary to support the design, maintenance and marketing costs of what they are trying to achieve.  Disappointment is hovering above a lot of retail environments.

Add to this struggling consumer growth effect the idea that not all business systems are working healthy.  For those who have been able to produce a manageable level of increased sales revenues, other complications have taken them down the disappointment trail.  Human resources are strained, under-performing and increasingly expensive to manage well.  Increased health care costs are becoming a troubling line item to manage.  Property and location costs have become a new long term issue.  Marketing has become so much more competitive.  Communication demands and the issues related to improving communications have become part of the new massive demand on an already stretched level of time chip use.  Business leaders just are not able to efficiently and properly keep up with the silent requirements of their processing work demands.  Some important stuff just simply gets put off.  Disappointment grows.  It has become such a normal part of every business leaders day.  We are starting to get used to it.

How do we properly manage disappointment in our business world?  How do we help our self accept those things that occur outside of our normal levels of reasonable control?  How do we cope with the stuff that goes wrong because we were too busy doing other important stuff trying to survive?  How do we manage disappointment in this new complicated world?

Page two.

Disappointment Can Become Very Ugly

Yesterday I heard a good story.  I will spare you the details.  The message I gained from the story is the best point to make.  When disappointment arrives learn how you plan to deal with that disappointment.  Those who have their own character reasonably designed well are the ones who will offer the best chance for dealing with unwanted disappointments.  In life, we all know how disappointment does appear.  It does not come with a great deal of warning.  It does not come with a clearly marked road map of things we can easily see.  Furthermore, when disappointment usually arrives it has a tendency to carry with it some form of suggestive blame.  It seems as though someone needs to be blamed.  This is usually how many people deal with disappointing outcomes.  They tend to lay blame onto someone other than their own doings.  This is usually performed to exonerate oneself from creating the disappointment that arrived.  We quietly play the blame game.

It does not take a whole bunch of life knowledge to see these kinds of effects that human beings process when disappointment arrives unwanted.  They begin dealing with disappointment in negative ways.  This only adds pressure to an already tough situation.  It works much like adding gasoline to a smoldering set of embers.  Flames will flare up.  When disappointment arrives, work over time on avoiding the blame game.  Get as far away from blame as you can muster.  In fact, take the full blame on all by yourself.  That way others will begin to move onto better things much quicker.  Who cares, anyway, as to who is at fault?  The disappointment has already arrived!  Get it repaired, reconditioned and back onto the trail of success as quickly as is possible.  That becomes the next best step to take when disappointment arrives.  In order to make this step of recovery happen quicker the blame game must be removed.  Learn how to work on the prevention process after the recovery is first set in place.

One of the easiest things to ignore when disappointment arrives is how to quickly adjust for better outcomes to begin happening.  Usually when disappointment first shows up the next thing we tend to do is to try and find out why disappointment has arrived.  We begin immediately looking for the reasons why disappointment landed on our doorstep.  This is our first normal reaction.  We receive some form of disappointment and immediately go looking for the reasons why it arrived.  This is a good thing to do, however, it is also something we can work on just after we turn the disappointment back around into something worthwhile to build.  Once we correct how the disappointment arrived, we can go back when it has been removed and find out what types of prevention we must add to our management ways.  Blame and cause can be discovered well after we deal with and correct the disappointing event.

Learn how to plan for disappointment events.  Learn how to mange the corrections first when disappointment arrives.  Build your people up when disappointment lands in your backyard.  Show your followers how strong you are when disappointment comes knocking at your business door.  Lead them to the proper repair.  Get your business model placed back onto the winning track.  Find newer solutions to building better stuff.  Generate support for how well your team deals with the disappointments your business will constantly face.  Become the leader that survives whatever disappointment musters up to deliver.  Find fault at a much later stage.  I have never heard a great business leader describe how they did so well because of the faults they were able to point out.  Not once has that ever become a part of any one's success story.

Much like the story I heard yesterday, all fault was avoided.  Only correction to repair was added to the schedule of work when their disappointment arrived.  Blame was never mentioned.  Their outcome had already delivered a much better set of wanted results than what they were producing before the disappointment arrived.  In their case, the correction was met and was delivering new outcomes that were better than before.  Disappointment became their best friend.  It forced a change that was necessary to do.

Sometimes our disappointments become the best change agents we can hire.  They just do not look good when they arrive.

Learn how to manage your disappointments in life.  They will arrive and they will come unwanted.  Your next step becomes the way you properly deal with those disappointments when they arrive.  Just make sure you do not add blame to that game of repair.

Until next time...