a canadian startup

From the Inbox (Nice Customer Email)

It’s always great to receive nice customer emails.

Can We?

I like flash carousels, but we discuss all changes to the site as a group first:

Well.ca visits Maple Syrup Festival

On Saturday, the entire Well.ca team (plus friends) went to the Elmira Maple Syrup Festival. It’s the largest one day maple syrup festival in the world!

We ate way too many pancakes, had too much food, and then spent the afternoon at our homes, recovering from the sugar headaches.

Alex also put up a video of them making taffy and me explaining the strategy behind getting taffy (toward the end).

Learn To Like Bad News

One of the most important management lessons I’ve learned came from a friend of mine who is a foreman for some of Toronto’s largest highway road repair projects. He is a young guy, same age as myself, but he manages teams of 50+ workers in some of the most high-pressure projects you could imagine.

His advice: a foreman needs to be someone to whom people like to bring bad news.

Make sense?

The first time a worker on his team messes up (costing the company, in one example, tens of thousands of dollars) the worker would come in shyly, explaining the situation and expecting an ear-full.

But instead of shouting, my friend would say:

Okay, give me all the info and I’ll make the calls. I’ll fix it.

When someone messes up on your team, they already know that they’ve done something wrong. But if you react negatively, your team members will begin to realize that it’s emotionally easier to hide the problem and try to cover it up instead of telling you right from the beginning.

So my friend’s logic was that by being pleasant in the face of bad news, he was encouraging his team members to come to him first, whenever something goes wrong.

Think about yourself. How would you react when one of your junior team members crashes the server, and loses some valuable data? How would you react if someone dropped an expensive laptop?

The important things to realize (and think about these things before anything bad happens) are:

• We all make mistakes
• If you are pleasant when people make mistakes, people will be open about them
• People are good at making themselves feel bad about mistakes without your help
• If people are constantly scared to make mistakes, it will hinder creativity, productivity, and happiness
• Being helpful when you could have been angry is the best way to earn unspoken “I owe you, man” points in the office. People respect a leader who reacts to bad news well, and is understanding of mistakes.

We all get angry sometimes. Especially startup entrepreneurs who set really high standards for themselves and are under constant pressure/drive to do more and more. We often ask too much from those that work with us — because we ask so much from ourselves — even though we ourselves make mistakes all the time.

In order to promote experimentation, and comfortableness in our workplace I have a special speech I give to all new people that work at Well.ca. It’s called the “the three bad things” speech.

In this speech, I basically tell new people that we all make mistakes, and that they should feel free to break things. We don’t mind. Play with and break everything. Except. For. The. Three. Bad. Things. We can’t tolerate any mistakes with the following things:

1. Sending the wrong products to the wrong person — triple check mailing addresses and packing slips
2. We follow strict guidelines with credit card numbers and private information — we are obligated to protect this info
3. Unless you are a pharmacist, never give medical advice.

The idea behind the “three bad things” is that, in rare circumstances, it’s useful to have people scared — for example one should always be nervous when touching people’s credit card numbers (or the software that processes them). But once you define the very few places where people should be nervous, you can explain that everything else is up for breakage — this makes people experiment and work without fear of having someone chew them out because they didn’t fill out the TPS reports double-spaced.

In cases where I want to make sure that the person who is bringing me bad news knows that I am not actually pleased, I will quickly say “oh. that’s not good” and never mention the unfortunate-ness of the situation again. This let’s people know that you’re not happy, but have chosen to focus on fixing the problem, not fixing the blame. And by saying “that’s not good” instead of “how could you do that” you refrain from focusing on the person which will keep them from feeling personally attacked and, as a result, going on the defensive.

Be nice to people when they bring you bad news.

And if you’re the person bringing the bad news, here’s what I suggest:

• Be up-front and honest
• Take ownership. Say “I messed up”. Say it only once, and then focus on fixing the problem.
• After the problem is fixed, send an email saying something like: “hey, i feel bad about what happened yesterday when i thought that putting your laptop in the microwave for ten seconds was the right way to evaporate the coffee i spilled on your keyboard. i’ve thought about a couple strategies to make sure it doesn’t happen again such as XYZ and have already incorporated the new changes into my workflow.” That is, find a way to find the underlying problem, fix it, and let your manager know. “I take this very seriously” is a magic sentence.

But yeah. Be nice.