Communication blues.

Today I realised how much havoc miscommunication, or rather no communication at all, could possibly wreck in the healthy working relationships between two people. The situation is something like this : We have a parent group in US, one of the teams of which, takes care of a very small project. Due to the movement of a bigger project here, we decided, to sort of, start using (which would mean snooping and a bit of meddling around here and there) that small project. The only hitch was that, this decision was not communicated to them at all. I agree that the decision was pretty quick, but we had about 2 days, and thats a good enough time ! It turns out that the person handling this project in US was planning to do some major overhaul of the project, and our decision has restricted his 'freedom' of handling the project.

The unfortunate aspect is that I am caught right in between all this confusion, because I was the person who as asked to start 'using' that project. I have a very decent working relationship with this guy in US. Now, since the last 2 days during which all this confusion has arised, he seems to be in an angry mood. From the moment he got a hint that we were going to use his project, he used to discourage me into using it. I didn't understand the reasons behind it of course, but I used to patiently tell my team here about his views. I used to tell our team indirectly, as much as possible, that what we want to do, albeit a good one, is not being done in the right fashion. Still, no measures were taken to communicate our rationale behind the decision to use the project. Today, it has ended in an 'angry' email from him expressing his views.

All this has ended up in some friction in the communication between us. For the past two days, its somewhat evident in his communications with me. He doesn't respond immediately, he doesn't wish me at the start/end, his language and general mood has gone on the angrier side. Now I don't know whether to lie low for some days till he becomes his usual self again, or whether to act as if nothing has happened.

Looking back, I would say that an innocent email on the first day would have prevented all this. A good decision ended up in a sour note, just because it was not communicated.