For years I have been telling stories of clients who had lots of good news but missed it completely because of their focus on bad news. The thing is this: Owners and the C- Suite folks tend to be problem solvers day in and day out. We spend a better part of our day focused on putting out fires and dealing with the problems.
Often we find our client companies can say something like, “we have 98% order accuracy.” Because they are so focused on fixing the 2% inaccuracy, they neglect to pat themselves on the back for the 98% they got right. Yes, I understand. You are thinking 98% isn’t good enough. What about our customers in the 2% we screwed up?
In reality no one believes you get it right 100% of the time anyway. If you can explain what happened when the 2% went awry and how you fixed it, you will gain a great deal more confidence from your customers than by not addressing it at all.
One client of ours had 7 backorders. The CEO expressed concern over those 7 big black eyes. What we then learned is that it was 7 backorders out of 2800 orders. So a 99.75% success metric, certainly worth bragging about. This is a common reaction: the 7 or .25% “failure” wreak so much internal havoc that, sometimes, it overshadows the collective success of what is going right.
Please put on your rose colored glasses and focus for just one day on all the things going right. You likely have a goldmine of potential advantages you neglected, for too much attention on a few errors.
