Miscommunication...Oops!

Several of my most memorable experiences I have of miscommunication come from when I was the editor-in-chief of my high school yearbook staff. With this position comes a lot of responsibility for making sure tasks get completed on time. It is very common for their to be miscommunication between staff members, and it usually ends up with something not completed.

The one instance of miscommunication that stands out to me the most to me was when we had a miscommunication of who was suppose to complete a group of pages for one of our deadlines. Being the editor-in-chief, it was my job to post the names of people who were assigned which pages. After assigning pages to people, I would then tell the section editors how many pages I needed them to have complete by a certain deadline. These could be any completed pages, as long as they totalled to that amount. Then, each section editor would assign each person when those pages were due to them so they could double-check the pages before they got sent to the plant for production. This was a miscommunication that probably occurred over a week time period. But, it started by me not communicating clearly to one of the section editors how many pages I needed for that deadline. We had such a large staff that staff meetings were usually around 30 people. Either this editor was not present in the meeting, or was not paying attention to me talking during the meeting, and she missed the information about how many pages I needed from each section by the deadline. Since she did not hear that she needed pages due for this deadline, she just assigned her staff a small portion of pages, just so they would have something to do over the next week. A week later, it was time to submit the pages for the deadline. I approached that particular section editor because I had not received enough completed pages to mark her portion of the deadline complete. After asking her when she would have me the rest of the pages, she responded that she didn't realize she needed that many pages for this deadline. Since she did not have these pages completed, I had to personally go through and complete several additional pages to make up the difference between the pages she had given me and the pages we needed to have completed for the deadline. It was a pretty big mess at the time because completing a page can take a lot of time. It forced me to work on the pages during school, and then after school, continuing into the night. Needless to say, we met the deadline, but not without me having to go through a lot of additional stress that could have been avoided. I made sure from that point on that I talked to each editor individually before each deadline to make sure they knew how many pages I was expecting from them. This problem could have been avoided through several ways. One way would be that I should have confirmed that each person was at the meeting and ask them to repeat how many pages they had marked down that I needed by a select deadline. Another way I could have prevented this problem was speaking with each editor individually after the meeting to clear up any questions that they had and reaffirm that they had recorded the correct number of pages I needed for the upcoming deadline. Another way this problem could have been prevented would be if I would have checked on the specific progress of each page before the actual deadline date.

When this miscommunication occurred, it was one of my first deadlines in the first year being the editor-in-chief of the yearbook staff. After this incidident, I was wondering what I had gotten myself into by being the editor-in-chief of the yearbook staff...lol. Just kidding. I learned from this mistake and I fixed it from that point on, making sure that communication was a focal point for me. I went on to successfully complete my first year as editor-in-chief, and was then selected to serve as editor-in-chief for a second year, my senior year of high school.