As you all who read my posts probably know, I tend to get myself into situations where I am managing people and get totally frustrated. I’m in that situation again. I think this habit is a combination of several subconscious things:
- Forcing myself to learn/practice leadership skills
- Want to do good/help people
- Have a low tolerance for frustration
In any case, in this latest venture I’ve been doing okay alternating with being frustrated, depending on my mood. At the moment, I’m okay about it, but I have noticed some interesting, if mundane, things I want to share. You’ve heard the expression “herding cats”. Yep, it’s one of those, but with the right attitude it could be funny rather than enraging. So I’ll post today while I’m not frustrated and maybe it will be a fun read.
Several times a year I take my little shop “on the road” and vend in person at pet events. This year they all got cancelled due to the pandemic. Some volunteers turned the spring event into an online shopping weekend and it went fairly well, so I thought I’d try it with the fall event. Nobody else stepped up so I waved my hand and said to the crowd in general, “Heyo, let’s still do the shopping part of the event, but online! I’ll organize it!”
So the cats I’m herding are fellow vendors, aka small business owners. Retailers or craftspeople. Varying skill levels with technology. They range from having online shops like me to being totally offline and doing business only in person with email followups.
Following the example of the spring meeting, I set this up as a Facebook page. Each vendor creates a photo album on the page, loads up their product photos and info about their store. If they have an online shop, they can put in a link to the product page in their store. If they’re not online, they can just type their email address or however they want shoppers to indicate that they want to buy something. As you can see, the more technical you are, the better your presentation will be for potential shoppers, but we do the best we can with what we got. Facebook automatically generates one post for your album that shows your pictures. This is ideal because then each vendor gets one post, the shoppers don’t have to scroll through 1,000 posts by one vendor to get to the next one, etc. Equal eyeball exposure.
I drafted a brief Word document that has step by step instructions for setting this up, with pictures, and sent it to the vendors.
The event is in two weeks, and here’s how the set up has been going.
- People jumping in and posting pictures without reading my email that has a very brief explanation and the instruction document attached. So they had ten or twelve posts before I caught it and (after some argument!) got them to do it right and delete the extraneous posts.
- People who did not read the instruction document… that I’ve sent out twice now.
- People trying to do this from a phone, which as it turns out is quite hard! I knew that some people these days are almost 100% phone only and may not own computers, but hoped that the vendors wouldn’t be among them. (Shopping by phone is fine; configuring things is harder)
- People emailing me their pictures without even trying to do their album configuration
And the worst of all: the first person who got into the page (three weeks ago) immediately sent an invitation to the page to her entire list of followers. And THEN she started uploading her photos. This was mind-blowing because she was effectively inviting potential customers to come shop an empty page. (Fortunately, I have moderation turned on, so I just had to go through and decline all the invitations. Which also probably looks bad, but… )
We’ll get through it and I’m sure it will go fine in the end. The difficulties do have me wondering, though, if it’s even possible to organize something online. Throughout my IT career I’ve seen that people don’t read documents, they often don’t read past the first sentence of an email. This event has echoed that experience and added the fact that a lot of people almost literally need their hands held throughout a task. I can see that good leadership skills should make me hand-hold people cheerfully and without judgment, but how can you do that when you’re leading a bunch of people? You may not have time to hand-hold them all.