Good Day.
Tim is recovering from the OFFICE DISASTER* and so I am filling in for him.
I am an older, less engaging substitute, but I’m comfortable with that.
I work for a micro-urban school district of 9400 students and 1500 staff members give or take. We had an incident on Friday in which it appears a student brought something they shouldn’t have to school. We take student safety seriously and so the incident caused some major upheaval and inconvenience in Friday’s schedule for many students. In the end, the situation was resolved peacefully and no students were in danger, but a few lessons were definitely reinforced.
What does this have to do with marketing, customer service or other daily blurisms, you might ask?
We learned some things in the process.
• You cannot control the behavior of every single person. Sometimes people make bad choices. You will find this to be true in your family, your business, your church, any group large or small that you choose to be associated with. Think the best of folks, sure, but don’t let the bad stuff catch you off guard.
• You have to prepare for the worst case scenario. You have to think it through and practice it. It’s not simply enough to think you know what you will do when disaster strikes, but you need to have a written and practiced plan in place so that everyone knows what their role is in the situation. You can apply this to natural disaster, financial disaster, fashion disaster, you name it. Anyone who has a small child and has traveled even to the corner without benefit of the diaper bag knows this to be true. The scale may vary, but the value of preparation does not.
• You need good partners when disaster strikes. Our community police department was spot-on in their handling of this particular situation and as a result it was resolved safely and in a timely manner. Who are you partnering with to ensure the best outcome? Your bank, your suppliers, your ad reps should all be just what you need, or you need to look at making some changes. Those partners should make your job better, easier, brighter.
• You need good people in place within your organization. The staff members at our school were exemplary throughout the afternoon. They managed with skill what could have been a chaotic situation. If you have good people on the job, you may go weeks without acknowledging that. But if one makes a mistake (see #1), you jump on the correction bandwagon immediately. Take time to tell your employees and team members what they are doing well. And when it comes time to make hiring decisions, don’t settle. Hire the best, invest in their professional development and shout to the rooftops to anyone who will listen that your business or organization has the most exceptional employees. By the way, the best people usually do not come at bargain prices, but in the end they are worth every penny.
• Once your crisis has passed, tell the truth about what this means for your organization. We will not make promises that we cannot keep (see #1), but we can promise that we will do our very best (see #2, 3, 4). The stakes for your business, your family and certainly our school district are much too high to do otherwise.
Enjoy your day,
Lynn Miles Peisker
*The 4000 cables it takes to make Tim’s business run were disconnected during a major (but sure be a functional improvement and will look like something straight out of a design magazine if I know my sister-in-law) house rearrangement. It will take Tim, my nephew Will and the entire Missouri National Guard to reattach all of them, so hang in there in the meantime.
Love the insight from the older sister ! Maybe the two of you need to do this more often! Might be neat for all of us to learn about the roots if all this wisdom!