Last evening, I had a call with a client who was quite agitated over some delay. After what seemed a lifetime of barraging, he fell silent.
I took a couple of deep long breathe that allowed almost 15 to 20 seconds of silence between us.
And, then he broke the silence and still quite sharply said, Prasad, I am sorry, it is important that we start this project by Monday.
And again, after a brief pause, I asked him, would it be alright we go over the list of activities and check what can stop us from starting it on Monday.
He took out a list of activities to be completed for us to be ready to start the project.
And as we went through the activities one by one, we noted the ones that were already done and yet to be updated in the tracker and others that the team was working on and were scheduled to be completed by Friday morning. There were of course 3 to 4 items that required some stretching to make sure that they were completed. We both agreed to focus on those so that they remain in our radar.
At the end of the next 5 minutes, he seemed much relaxed and confident that a few things that can possibly stop us from starting the project as planned are well under control.
Today, when we met, we noted that we are ready to start the project as planned.
I was just wondering. How the conversation would have been, had I started interrupting him to clarify the position instead of just remaining silent?
What do you think?
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