How to successfully demotivate someone

I’m having a serious ‘off’ day today.

I’m working on a Request for Change Implementation to help us carrying out upgrades and other actions more efficient.

The procedure is based on a workflow designed by a consultant, you know who I am talking about, and, judging by the lack of feedback, accepted by everyone involved. I agree completely with this procedure, it enables us to do a structured approach to all changes which will, hopefully result in fewer errors during, or after a change.

So I started to implement the required changes in our Helpdesk application. This proved to be a bit more difficult that initially thought, but morale was high, and I managed to get all the problems fixed.

It was time for a small demonstration for the consultant… and this is where things started to go bad.
The first thing the consultant said was “God, that’s a huge amount of extra work, don’t you feel you have created a lot of overhead?” I managed to stay calm, barely. the same guy who created the procedure now bashes it because of the overhead He created. I was too baffled to go into discussion about it; instead I (politely) left the room to get some fresh air.

On returning we agreed that we probably wanted to demo the implementation in it’s current state to the people who will also be using it. I did not like this one bit, I was pretty sure about the reaction, so why bother.

Demo day:

As expected the general reaction was rather negative, not only about the implementation, but we where also being criticized about our work in general, about the large number of incidents surrounding a change. My Argument that this procedure was designed to minimize these incidents had little effect.

So here I am, trying to finish a procedure that I just know will be the center of criticism. It is taking a long time, maybe because I’m writing a post instead of actually doing some coding?

Time will tell…

So, To wrap it up

You can successfully demotivate someone by making great promises, letting someone implement the means to make the promises reality and then saying something that starts with “God…”