Career Lesson Reminder – Treat Everyone Well

Last week I was in London to attend a conference being put on by my employer, and to teach a training class in the days following the conference. With the conference allowing for a number of employees to be in town, I had a few newbies in my class as part of helping them understand the tool.

As it turns out, one of those new folks was a recent high level hire, brought in specifically to oversee our work in the eDiscovery industry, including training.

As it also turns out, he and I had met before, about 4 years earlier, in South Carolina.

That meeting occurred on the heels of a major change over of the Litigation Support management for the law firm where I was employed at the time. After an overhaul of management about 9 months after I joined, a consulting group was brought in to audit our processes and figure out the best way to move forward, and who to move forward with. It wasn’t quite the Bob’s from Office Space, but you’ll forgive me for thinking it wasn’t all that different either.

So, under those circumstances, we had met, and he was evaluating me, making notes about me and his impression of me. (He still had those notes as well, and told me he went back and looked at them in between days of class, luckily, they seemed to be positive) Now, here he was in my class, making evaluations about our new training program and how it was working so far and should move forward.

It would have been all too easy back then to forget one of the biggest career rules that you should be following:

Be nice to everyone. 

You want to leave everyone with whom you interact with a favorable impression, because you never know when/where you’ll see them, or someone they know, again. (And yes, that includes receptionists, waiters, cab drivers, etc. You truly never know when you might run into them again!) This is especially true in the eDiscovery industry, which always seems like such a small world to me. Seems like everyone I meet is already connected to people I’ve worked with in the past!

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