Ever have to deal with people who just suck the energy out of your day?  For most people, I suspect it's a coworker or boss.  Someone who comes to your office or cube or whatever and says something in such a way that seems almost designed to piss you off.

I don't run into that much since I don't have a boss.  But it still happens sometimes with business "partners". Sometimes when working with much larger companies on a project there is the tendancy for some high up project manager who, being so used to be "the boss", has shed any skills in diplomacy and will send me an email or call me on the phone to essentially tell me what to do. 

I had that happen to me today. Got an email from a senior level manager from one of our business partners who sent the most condescending email to me telling me how we were doing something wrong.  But it wasn't "wrong" it simply wasn't the way they wanted to even though it's really not their place (i.e. they're not a business customer, just a partner).  And they finished it off with a "see to it that this is changed immediately" (paraphrasing). 

This manager probably has more underlings than we do employees.  But I'm really not used to being spoken to that way.  Particularly when we hadn't done anything wrong, we simply didn't do things their way.

But it had the effect of sucking all the energy out of me for the day.  On the one hand, my gut wants to just set them straight. They have no leverage on us. On the other hand, I am keenly aware that a good relationship with our business partner is important to the company.  Thinking on how to handle such a scenario drains away a lot of energy.  The energy that I might have put into writing a few great functions or writing up several pages of documentation or writing a good media guide or tutorial instead got sucked into putting together the right response that balanced diplomacy with "Hey, don't talk to us that way, buddy."

I wonder how many lost man hours there are each year because of some inept manager needlessly antagonizes their coworkers due to a lack of diplomatic ability?