We FCKD UP…and we are celebrating!!
Last evening, while preparing my son’s birthday dinner, I received a call from one of my teammates. As it is rare for me to receive calls from my team in the evening, my first thought was, this is either really good news (they’ve landed a big deal) or really bad news (what could it be?).
Turns out it was the latter – really bad news. My teammate told me he had made a mistake and dropped the ball on getting an event booked into our master schedule. We had completely let down a client as they were expecting us to host an event for them and we were not ready or able to do so. We messed up and really let our client down.
So why are we celebrating? A few reasons:
1. My teammate felt psychologically safe enough with me and within our JAM Events culture to own his mistake. He did not make excuses or place blame or try to hide his mistake. He called me right away to own it and share his plan for how he hoped to win back the client.
2. This morning at our daily team huddle (with his permission), I shared the mistake with our entire team. Now they are all aware so we ALL have an opportunity to learn from it. We know exactly what we did wrong and we will work to improve our process to ensure this never happens again. The rest of our team hopefully sees clearly that it is ok to make mistakes and own them and will feel safe doing so when they inevitably make a mistake in the future. We all make mistakes. Learning from them is how we will continue to “find a better way” (one of our core values) and get better.
3. We now have the opportunity to create a raving fan in the future! We will go over and above to apologize and delight our client. Studies have shown that an unhappy customer that’s transformed into a delighted one becomes even more loyal than a satisfied customer. In other words, people tend to be even more satisfied when they’ve had a problem and it’s been satisfactorily handled than if they never had the problem, to begin with. So while we cannot change what happened we can take full responsibility and work to impress our clients and create raving fans out of them in the future.
We will keep making mistakes, learning from them, and finding a better way!
#findabetterway #teambuilding #cultureiseverything