I have to give a shout out to Jamie this week. I helped run a class for him last Friday that wound up being very successful. Leading up to the class, he went above and beyond to make my job easier.
Preparing for this class was fairly straightforward: announce the course, receive applications, admit attendees to the course, gather materials, make hotel reservations, and collect PowerPoint presentations.
We have deadlines that we send to our presenters for the course and because Jamie is the leading expert in this particular subject matter, he was on the agenda to teach for much of the day. Jamie has a tendency to want things to be just right, and rightly so. He is known to tweak his PowerPoint until the very last second. Thus, when it came to materials, I didn't have much to work with around the time of the deadline.
I went forward with printing the agenda and evaluation as I awaited the rest of the materials. The rest of the materials did come of course, but would require that I assemble them in folders, or do much of the materials as handouts. Materials are not one of the things that stress me out. There are so many options for disseminating materials, that as long as I have a day or two I can get most copies printed on time.
I had an unusually busy week leading up to Friday. I lost Monday to Labor Day, then I presented at SGMP, took Gardner to the doctor for his 1 year check up, picked my mom from the airport, and got all the food for Gardner's 1st birthday party for Saturday. Each of these things seemed to fall on a different day, and by Wednesday I was so busy that I didn't even make it into the office.
When I arrived back in the office on Thursday, I couldn't seem to find my materials in the print shop or on my desk. When I went to talk to Jamie about it, he had assembled them into the folders. This was a pleasant surprise and yet so unnecessary. His reasoning of course was that he wanted to make sure things were in a certain order, but I assured him that I had plenty of time to do it before the class.
While last minute handouts can sometimes create some additional work, it certainly isn't a big deal for me to complete. We were expecting 25 people for this class, so the time it would have taken was not so significant. This small act reaffirmed what I already knew... I work with incredibly caring and thoughtful people. I'm sure Jamie just thought he was being helpful, but the small act definitely made a difference in my day.
Later that afternoon, Jamie and I stood at the color printer and manually fed paper through it so that we could save some paper and have another spiffy looking handout for our folders. Yet, I didn't mind, and neither did he. That alone makes you feel supported in the organization you work for. No matter the differences in title or education, we're all people and we need to work together to make events happen.