How To Make The Most Out Of Employee “Mistakes” & Reduce The Chances Of Them Happening Again

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Lauren: This is The Biz Doctor Podcast. And I’m your host, Lauren Goldstein.

Welcome back to the show. In today’s episode, I’m gonna [00:00:30] talk about something that will help your business run like a well oiled machine and empower your team post mortems. I know that sounds gross, but trust me, it’s gonna change your business and. Because one of the hardest things we business owners get to grapple with is letting go, and more specifically, letting go and letting our teams make mistakes.

Now, I don’t believe that mistakes are bad unless there’s nothing that’s learned from them. If we ignore the lesson and we just keep making the same mistake over and over again, that is either sabotage, insanity, or just plain up. The reality is that most experience comes from mistakes. So the more we can celebrate and learn from them, the faster our teams will go.

The more impact we will have as business owners and the more experience we will have to make great things a reality. So today I’m going to share with you a simple process we use to make the most out of mistakes so that not only can we mitigate the chances of them happening again, but so we can actually have a team that’s empowered to use these mistakes to build a better business and gain experience to take us.

Here’s how to do the postmortem conversation. Three simple questions. What happened? Why did it happen? And how can we adjust or build a system or so p to make sure it doesn’t happen again? The first question is one of the most important, so that everyone is on the same page. Sometimes situations arise that are crystal clear.

You know exactly what happened. There’s no ambiguity. While others may look different from different perspectives. So it’s paramount to make sure that everyone knows exactly what happens and what the actual mistake was. No ambiguity, absolute clarity. Second, we need to know why something happened. This isn’t the time for blame.

It is the time for cold hard facts. What was the moment of breakdown that led to the incident occurring? Was it a communication issue? Was it that someone forgot a step to do something? Was it a specific thing or things that led up to the incident? It could be one thing. It could be a dozen related things that created a domino effect.

It doesn’t matter. What matters here is the accuracy and clarity about what actually transpired that caused the break. I’m actually gonna give you an example here of something recently that happened in our other business. I, um, happened to be sitting at my desk and just saw this number calling our, our mainline.

We use a very cool tool called Grasshopper that calls all of all of the people who are on the phone tree. I’m the very last person in the phone tree, so I knew that somebody wasn’t answering and it was after hours, but they kept calling back. So finally, I went into Grasshopper, listened to their voicemail, and this customer was mad.

They were very mad about the delays and et cetera, et cetera. And I’m thinking to myself, this is so weird because we have a system in place that keeps the customer, you know, up to date sets, expectations, et cetera. And so I’m, I’m very perplexed. So I sent a slack to the. Because it was, you know, an hour earlier in Colorado and I said, Hey, can you tell me a little bit more about what happened with this customer?

I’m gonna give them a call. So they explained the situation. I called them. I wanted to know what the customer, you know, was struggling with, what would make her happy, et cetera. And in this particular situation, what had happened was she ordered something, it had been delayed due to supply chain. And the credit card that she originally used, which she thought had been charged, even though all of our documentation says your card is not charged until it’s, it’s shipped, she wanted to change the credit card and didn’t realize that it was shipping, which is again, very funny because the team talked to her three days before it was shipping, said it’s gonna ship out on Monday.

Anyway, long story short, I did a post mortem on this cuz there were so many moments in this. Customer exchange that could have been pivotal in moments to change the outcome. Right. When I do a postmortem, again, the question that I first asked is, what happened? And so in this case, the customer was mad because her product was delayed and then we charged a card that she actually didn’t want us to charge, even though that was the credit card she gave us.

Long story short, I knew what had happened. Now I wanted to know why it happened. So when I ask why something happened, there is not a detail that I leave unturned. I went all the way back to the first moment of contact with this customer and I said, what was her first experience with us? Was the first step of this cascade done, and the first step in this case should have.

A very simple email saying, thank you for your order. It looks like this product is on back order, resetting expectations, and that wasn’t done. So then I asked a question of  why was that not done? And it turns out that her initial order was for a different product size. So in that moment, that first cascade was not necessary because the product was in stock and.

Because I asked the question of why did that not happen, and I found out why the email was not sent. Resetting expectations around timing, reiterating when we charge a credit card, et cetera, I realized that there was a gap in our SOPs. And yes, again, critical thinking, but this is probably a once in a lifetime moment.

So because something went from in stock to then out of stock because she changed the size, the gap was not reiterating the timing of that. Because in our, so p, the first step when something is out of stock is to send it, but then if something goes from in stock to outta stock, that changes the sop.

Anyway, I won’t bore you with more details, but suffice to say that when I ask why something happened, I’m going as deep as possible to the very first point of where something went off the rails, the first point of breakdown. And so because of that, because I’m relentless with really getting to the root of why something happened, What that gives me is so much data.

The fun part about postmortems is sometimes when you do a postmortem on one thing, you find something else that could actually be improved. So asking this question why, and not just being satisfied with the surface level answer is gonna be key. So if we go back to our example, I found out the first moment of breakdown, and then I literally went.

Every email chain, every correspondence with the customer to see was there a moment in time where we could have better communicated something, been more clear, reset expectations? And the answer was yes. So do I love that this happened? Absolutely not. And the team agreed when we did our postmortem that this was a disaster from the start.

We don’t miss a lot, but this one, just literally everything that could go wrong. Did go wrong and sometimes that happens. It’s called business. It was a very valuable lesson for the team as a whole. We got to adjust some other SOPs. We got to look at where we missed the mark, where we could have done better.

And it just allows the business to again, come back to running like a well-oiled machine, cuz things are gonna happen, but the more you are able to dig into why they happened and look at all the different threats and intricacies and moving pieces. The easier it will be next time when something like this happens for the team to be proactive.

Again, you hear me say this time and time and time again in these episodes of a proactive business is the goal. If your business is still being reactive, then it’s going to be tiny fire triage all the time. So now that you have the clarity around what happened and why now is the fun part, I mean, I think the why is fun, but this is actually more fun for the.

And that is solving for X. This is the part where you can empower your team to put in navigational beacons in the business to make sure that this doesn’t happen again. The reason I love this step so much is because of the simple truth that no matter how proactive you are, no matter how great your onboarding is, or how many players you have on your team, how many SOPs, et cetera, et cetera, mistakes just happen and generally they happen because of a lack of clarity system or.

Once you have that gem of mistake sitting in your lap, now is the time to learn from it and build around it, because now you have something even more valuable experience. So my favorite question to ask the team is, how would you suggest we do this? The title of this episode was How to Make the Most Outta Employee Mistakes and Reduce the Chances of Them Happening Again.

So by asking this question, it makes your team really take ownership over what happened and how to make sure it doesn’t happen again. It makes them invest in the solution, and most importantly, it takes you out of the equation. What I mean is, Being a boss is great most of the time, but where I can invite you in the bum is when your team is constantly coming to you for permission or sign off or to solve problems.

But instead with this question, they feel empowered to not only solve the problem in the moment with creative solutions, but then they have more ownership and pride in their role. Do you see. So when you let the team pow well first and come up with solutions, you are empowering them to really own every part of the breakdown and subsequent breakthrough.

And once you have the solve, my best advice is to find a way to make it permanent. Put it in your knowledge base, SOPs, et cetera, wherever your team can easily access your process and system so that when this particular thing pops up in the future, you guys can nip it in the. Oh, and a quick note about systems and processes.

Just like your business, which is in my opinion, a living, breathing entity, your systems and processes should be too. Now, I’m not saying to mess with them, just to mess with them. We all know  where that goes. I’m saying don’t be tempted to set ’em and forget ’em or write them and then never review them again.

Because as we go through life and business, we should always be looking for ways to improve, and as technology advances, so should our systems and processes. Don’t be surprised if an SOP that has 10 steps two years ago now only needs four because of a SaaS tool that was created or a more efficient way that was found by the team.

I recommend a yearly business review. At minimum, this is where you go through all the things that are working really great in your business. You can do more of them and address the stuck points or areas of opportunity so you can improve. It might seem like a pain in the button now, but I will save you countless hours later.

So there you have it. How to do a business postmortem. To recap, three simple questions are what happened? Why did it happen? How do we make sure it doesn’t happen again? Have fun with this guys. It could be serious. I don’t recommend it being too serious. I recommend it to be something that’s fun and curious and where you guys celebrate mistakes.

Have a little bell . We actually talked about that in our business. You know, every mistake gets a little bell and we celebrate it because again, mistakes breed experience. So try to have some fun with it. Don’t dwell. Mistakes are normal. And they could be some of your best bets in how to make your business better.

So that’s it for this week’s episode. Thanks so much for listening in. If anything I shared sparked something in you, I’d love to hear from you. So let’s connect. Tag me or DM me on Instagram at it’s Lauren Goldstein or LinkedIn or wherever you hang out on the interwebs. Also, don’t forget to subscribe, so you’re the first to get notified when our next episode is live and ready for your ears.

Thanks so much for listening until next time.

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