Communication is a cooperative effort.
If every single time we attempted to communicate with someone else we were forced to ensure that every little tidbit of information was spelled out with mathematical precision, we would spend all our time talking and there wouldn't be any time left to actually get anything done.
We depend on a certain level of assumption in order to make our communications efficient.
Misunderstandings occur because of this level of imprecision in our communication. But two reasonable people can work out the miscommunication and move on with the real work.
This, of course, breaks down as soon as one member of the conversation refuses to be reasonable in this way. This is a form of pettiness.
There are times, of course, when people might not wish to engage in an earnest exchange of information for arguably valid reasons. Talking to a known enemy, for example, often demands guarding information. This, however, is outside the scope of this presentation.
Here, I am simply discussing the condition where one is engaging in what is expected to be a friendly and cooperative discussion, such as between colleagues or acquiantences. In such an environmnent, there is an implicit contract that the goal of the conversation is to exchange information.
Therefore, refusing to be reasonable and work toward understanding is a violation of the contract. Just because the words aren't correct, if the meaning is clear, communication has taken place. To pretend you don't understand simply because there is an outside chance that the words could mean something different than the obvious is being petty -- you are being unnecessarily concerned with the rules of definition and grammar to the point of interfering with genuine communication. And all it does is slow everything down.
Another form of pettiness involves demanding a complete set of information before making any effort toward the goal.
For example, I once worked at a place where we lost an employee who used to handle communications with an outside agency. The boss came back and assigned one of my teammates with the duty of picking up that recurring task.
Quite reasonably, he asked how he was supposed to take care of the issue with no training or previous exposure to the process. In response, the boss handed him a list of outside agent contact information, indicating "This should help".
My teammate then asked for further directions on what to do, complaining that all he got was a list of phone numbers and E-Mail addresses. He actually asked, "What am I supposed to do with this?". Any reasonable person would likely conclude that, given a list of contact information, perhaps one should make an effort to contact someone at the agency in question.
Someone else, on the other hand, overhearing the conversation, picked up the list, found the outside agency on it, and called the contact. Within about twenty minutes, we had a new liason to the outside agency and communication lines were restored.
Now, of course there are any number of possible explanations for the first person's behavior. But most likely, he just didn't want to do the extra work, so he pretended not to know what to do with a list of phone numbers and E-Mail addresses. Any reasonable person would have at least tried the number or address to see if that would yield some progress on the issue. But, playing the petty card, this person cited the absence of specific instructions in order to avoid doing the work.
The irony, of course, is that the real accomplishment was this person became labeled as lazy, incompetent, and a problem employee. From that day forward, he almost never got handed the interesting tasks, because nobody trusted he would complete them. Instead, he was forced to slog through boring, mindless, repetetive tasks.
Further, he earned himself a higher level of micromanagement from that day forward than anyone else on the team, since he couldn't be trusted to do the work on his own initiative. He chafed horribly under the managerial microscope, and he was miserable until the day he left the job.
This was a willful form of pettiness, and it earned him a willfully difficult situation. But even habitual pettiness still causes problems. Pettiness, intentional or otherwise, irritates people who want to honestly get something done, because it gets in the way and slows everything down.
Next Up: Perfection vs. Effectiveness