vombie.com

One thing I have always championed is the need for communicating expectations with everyone, whether it be personal or professional. Recently I’ve found that the way people manage to be passive aggressive with this is to broadly and vaguely define terms so that it becomes a guessing game as to what is expected. If you try to ask questions to clarify requirements, the answers returned will be vague and useless, and it turns into a lobbing match, back and forth, to see who can get the ball off their side of the net. This means that person’s objective is to avoid responsibility, to ‘win’ rather than to work together towards the same goal. It forces you into a petty game where you develop something and shrug when it doesn’t meet expectations; nobody told me, I didn’t know. When did communication become a contest?