Is It a Mistake or a Pattern? How Great Leaders Know the Difference

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How many times have you seen something and thought, uh-oh?

So many.

The problem is, is it's usually one something and that's not something you really want to panic about. No, I'm a—

yeah, I freak out the first moment.

Yeah. No, that's, that's what we— so speaking of freaking out, we're going to talk about that in a second too.

Okay.

Stay tuned. She's the CEO.

He's the marketing and operations guy.

If it's broken, you need The Business Fix. Speaking of panic, one of the things that I absolutely love is we— this is episode what, 64?

Yeah.

And every single time that we sit here and we're starting to do the hook, because you walk into this completely blind, you look at the camera, and in many cases, you have the look of, "I'm being held hostage. I don't know what's happening next.

Send help." I don't like it. Yeah. Because in our notes, it always says, "Josh will do the hook." It doesn't really say anything.

No, no, no. I love the element of surprise. I love the fact that, once again, it like— and most of Actually, it's funny because when we talk about the hook, I, in a lot of cases, before we walk into the studio, I've got a general idea, but I don't have it worked out. I'm in a lot of cases coming up with those on the fly just because I know what questions we want to ask. I know what questions we want to answer for people and stuff like that. But really, it's— I truly love coming in and catching you completely off guard.

I don't like it, but I deal with it because I'm resilient.

I got to sit through 45 seconds of this.

You'll be fine.

And then we get to talk about stuff I actually want to talk about.

What I like doing. It's all good.

We'll get to the— this is the tough part. And unfortunately, like, one of the things that we're going to talk about, that actually is a pattern. It is. It's not an anomaly.

It's not. Feels like an anomaly every freaking time, but it's not. It's part of the pattern and process.

One of these days I'm waiting for you to say, Josh, can you bring in your motorcycle helmet so I can wear it?

During the intro, please. Yes.

Um, this week we are talking— like, I've said this a couple of hundred times, I think, in the 64 episodes. Once is not a pattern. We've realized this needs a deeper dive because when, like, some people— like, yeah, I know you see it on the HR side of things where they're like, well, it's only happened a couple of times. And you're like, yeah, a couple of hundred. That's a pattern.

Yeah.

So when does it go from the anomaly to the pattern? Like, as business owners especially, but many managers kind of lack that calibration because it's a threat. It could be a— and I mean, if you have a culture of fear, it's instantly a threat no matter what it is.

Yeah, absolutely.

That one time can just— I mean, Is someone going to lose their ever-loving mind over this? And other times those chronic mistakes are excused as just, it's a simple mistake. It's not a big deal. We've both seen the like, and I know from the HR side you've seen some pretty big deals that have been like, oh, this is a little mistake.

No, it's not.

It is.

It is.

The mistake. It's not a little mistake, it is the mistake. This is where things come undone. From the HR, from the behavioral standpoint, like, why are humans hardwired to see that single threat as— or that single error as a massive threat?

Yeah.

And like, why do people panic Because we're human.

I mean, it's done. We're done recording. We can go home now. It's because we're human.

That means the hook was a large majority of the show, and I don't think you want that.

You don't want that to happen. All right.

Well, you don't want that to happen.

I will say, okay, because we're human and humans are not naturally objective, we're naturally protective. Yes. So when something goes wrong, our brain immediately starts trying to answer the question, what does this mean? What's going on? And usually we answer that question way too quickly. But I think we can use the 3 C's, because we love C's, of calibration. So, and those are curiosity, context, and conclusion.

Not catastrophic.

Not catastrophic. Not at all. Calibration, curiosity, context, and conclusion. So curiosity, healthiest leaders stay curious longer. Instead of, why did they do that? You're gonna ask, what happened? Yes. It's a totally diff— see, if you say, why did they do that? As opposed to, well, what happened? Help me understand. Those are two very different questions.

One's a statement almost.

Yes. Well, one assumes positive intent and one seeks understanding. So I mean, like, it's just like we've got to have understanding around it. Let's assume the positive intent and seek understanding as opposed to like it's an interrogation of why.

Where were you on the night?

Exactly. No, this is not. So that's curiosity. And then context. Our brains are wired for something that we call negativity bias. So we remember criticisms, mistakes, and failures much more vividly than success. And it's natural. It's wired to keep us alive. You know, when someone ate the plant with the red berries and they died, like, that's one of the reasons why we're set to remember those things. All right. But we're not dealing with those types of situations anymore. Most of the time now it's Bob sent an email that was a little critical and we think we're dying.

Yeah.

And we never want to answer an email from Bob ever again. No, Bob is not the red berries. It's okay. We can deal with it.

So I just know if you ever bring red berries for me, I will not eat them.

There you go. There's a problem. Yeah. So I mean, one mistake feels enormous even when it's surrounded by 99 examples of success, because again, we are hardwired for negativity bias because our brain's hardwired to see the mistakes so we stay alive.

Yeah.

So we have to think about that in context and then conclusion. And this is where I think sometimes we can get in trouble, right? Because we skip curiosity, we skip context, and we go straight to a conclusion. Of course. Yeah. And then suddenly that typo that somebody made is complete incompetence, that missed deadline that that person is no longer committed to the organization. A bad day becomes a bad employee. So the fastest way to make a bad leadership decision is to skip curiosity and rush to that conclusion. So you've got to think curiosity first, context second, and conclusion last. So the 3 C's have an order in this process, and you need to follow them.

100% makes sense because it's so funny. They say in many cases, The fastest way is a straight line. Yeah. The fastest way is not always the best way.

No, it's not.

Take it from someone who has a motorcycle. The fastest way is not always the best way. You in many cases want to take the scenic route because you get better information. Yeah. What happens when that leader overreacts? Not that we've ever seen anyone ever overreact to anything before.

Never.

Why? Why? Like, when they treat an anomaly like a systemic failure, what does that do to the psychological safety of a team? Like, do they work better? Do they just like, okay, I'm going to hide behind the machine until this all blows over?

Yeah. So if people are afraid of the reaction, they're always going to hide reality. Yeah. So fear improves concealment, not performance. Ooh. You want to needlepoint that?

Yes.

Fear improves concealment, not performance.

Are we going to come out with the—

I think we should.

The Chrissy pillow collection, the needlepoint pillows.

We probably should.

I love this.

So when there's an overreaction, this is where psychological safety starts disappearing. And it's not because of the mistake, it's really because of the reaction that the manager or the leader had to the mistake. And it's where you also have ignored curiosity and context and you've jumped straight to that conclusion. Again, you did it wrong, you didn't follow the steps. So let's go back and follow the right order of curiosity, context, and conclusion. So curiosity, when leaders react emotionally, employees are going to learn that that mistake is dangerous. I'm going to die. They're not going to learn that the mistake is fixable. All right. So to keep people from thinking mistake, I'm going to die, we take a tone of curiosity when things are amiss. We ask questions with the right tone. Don't start with, Bob, you idiot. Right?

One time.

Because then Bob's not going to want to talk to you or tell you when he's messed something up. So it's, help, can you help me understand? And say it in a tone that isn't like, well, can you help me understand? Don't. You've got to say it. Can you help me understand?

Tone means a lot here.

Tone is extremely important.

You actually have to be curious. You can't feign curiosity.

No, you can't. You need to be genuinely curious. And then when someone makes a mistake, the other thing that I think a lot of times managers, especially if they're not trained effectively, do is they step on people's dignity. And I mean, the why not will lead us to context. This is why we're not going to step on people's dignity, okay? If people do not feel that they can make a mistake or effectively solve their own problems, people are going to start managing perception instead of performance. And this is what I call performance theater in the workplace. So then people spend all of their energy looking busy, they're protecting themselves, they're avoiding visibility instead of solving problems.

So what if they come in and a curtain opens?

It's not what you want. So I mean, here's what I'll say and some of the things that we do at Clarity. This is not an uncommon problem that comes to us in the fractional HR space. We get this a lot.

Yes.

Right? An employee gets publicly embarrassed over a small mistake, and suddenly, because that employee got embarrassed, the whole team starts double-checking everything. They avoid decisions. They no longer want to have those conversations where we could make the business better, we could make the product better, we could serve the customer better, because they don't want to deal with the potential of being embarrassed. And they start escalating the tiniest issues. It's like, we used to never have to have an escalation for a change order, and now all of a sudden, we've got like 15 escalations. Escalation change orders that I all of a sudden as the manager have to do. Well, why is that? Well, because you embarrassed Bob in a meeting because he asked a question and you told him that it was dumb. And the reason that they do this is because they're afraid of being next. And then the leader doesn't understand why morale's down or why the performance issues are stalled. They're like, "I don't understand what's wrong with my team." The short answer is usually you, but We don't say that. We say, why don't we have some curiosity about it? Can you help me understand why you think the team might be this way? Let's have some context. In the last meeting, what happened? Can you help me? Can you explain it to me? So yeah, so you've got curiosity and context.

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Like, how do you objectively document like behavior though when there's no hard— like, it's not a sales KPI. How do we turn like the vibes of this— you mentioned like the— right, how do you turn that into something that's quantifiable so it's not just like, hey, the office feels good today.

Yeah.

Or everyone's scared.

So the polar opposite of people living in fear to make a mistake, and it's vibes. Great. So leaders are constantly coming to HR and they're saying, "I just have a feeling. I have a feeling." I know. "I have a feeling." And it's like, "Okay, but feelings aren't documentation." No. But feelings are not documentation, but it's something we can work with. So we're going to walk through the framework of curiosity, context, and conclusion. So curiosity, we're going to start by getting curious about what you're actually seeing. So, and it's not, well, this person has a bad attitude. And it's like, no, what type, why, when, how, where? Their negative energy, you know, this person just has a lot of negative energy. The questions I'm going to ask then are going to be, well, when, why, where, who with? Who with is a very key question because it's like, oh, they just have negative energy with you. Hmm. Let's talk about that.

There's a lot of you're the problems here.

There are. There are. Especially if we really get curious, we're going to find out that a lot of times we're just doing it And that's okay. And the other one with curiosity is when people just come in and they're like, this person's a poor culture fit. I want to know why. Is it a skill gap? Is it a will gap? Is it a you problem? I mean, those are labels. So you have to ask yourself what you're seeing, then too, the context, and then document it. So what specifically happened? Again, we're getting very specific. Can you point to missed deadlines, repeated interruptions, defensive responses, failure to follow through? If we've got some of those things, then we have something real in context. So then we can go to a conclusion because once the behavior becomes observable, it becomes discussable. And once it becomes discussable, it becomes coachable. And you can't coach a vibe, but you can coach behavior.

Yes.

Again, I think that should be a needle point. You can't coach a vibe. You can coach a behavior.

I like— please, if you think we should do this as a, like, as a side hustle, I think we might need to. Real quick, I want to say, like, I joke about, like, how most of the time the problem is you. Not you specifically, but it is the figurative you. Yeah, I, I love it when that is, because that's easier to look at, that's easier to fix.

It absolutely is.

When it's— then when it's half your team, yes, it's easier to be like, oh hey, I'm the idiot here, I need to do better.

Great, great, I can improve me. It's one of the easiest things to improve upon once we know it's an issue. And that's a conclusion that we can have. And then we know, do we need to coach it? Do we need to correct it? Do we need to cut it?

We've talked about that.

We have.

I love that.

Yeah. So Josh, you love numbers and a good dashboard.

No.

I know. I'm so excited. We talked about the 3 C's. Now I want to know how we operationalize this so we stop chasing mistakes and ignoring those bigger issues.

So there's a couple of things. There's a 3-step program. You would think it would be a 12-step program. It's a 3-step program. 3 steps.

It's 3 steps.

Steps. Um, I, I like this fast-track stuff, you know.

I like it too.

Define the anomaly. So like, first off, you have to see what is an anomaly. It— I've got a great story about this. About a week ago, I was in the shower, was thinking about a bunch of stuff with the business. Get out of the shower, realizing I still had shampoo in my hair.

You did not follow your process.

I did not follow my— did not follow my shower process. No, because I'm more like Kramer in the shower where it's just there. Um, but to me that was an anomaly. Yeah, that doesn't mean I had a stroke. That doesn't mean that I'm brain dead. It was, it was a blip.

You were deep in thought.

Yeah, correct. It was a, an an actual mistake. Um, I believe I've made other mistakes in life, a number of them. Uh, Kim has made quite a few mistakes.

We're not going there.

So that being said, I mean, if an employee followed an SOP perfectly for 90 days and suddenly misses a step, okay, don't panic. Don't write a new policy. Like, let the person that made the mistake know about it in a way like, hey, Did you know this happened?

It happens occasionally, right? Yeah.

Typically they're going to be like, oh yeah, we found that. Great. Go along with your day. Go along with your life. The problem is, is what I see in so many cases is someone leaves shampoo in their hair and suddenly they're like, we can't take showers anymore. If that can happen, we're not—

there's a checklist, right?

Right. We're not taking showers anymore. And the problem is, is you've now fixed that. Like, I will probably— if I stopped taking taking showers. I mean, we're in the studio, it's warm.

There's gonna be another problem, right? There's other problems we're gonna have to discuss, right?

Studio's kind of small. It's like Chrissy Myers is like, we're done doing the podcast. It's one of those things where, to me, it— like, if you say, look, we need to prevent the shampoo problem, so we're done taking showers, we're never taking showers again, well, now you've caused 10 other problems. Yeah, by fixing a mistake, not by fixing a, a problem. So acknowledge it, discuss it with the involved parties, clean up the immediate mess, Note it in your head and go back to doing your damn job.

Yeah, it's okay.

Correct. The second piece to that, so define repetition. I always feel like twice is, twice is a warning. The second time the same error occurs within a 30 or 60 day window, you have a signal. This is not the time to fire. This is not the time to yell. This is time for a quick pause and an audit. Hey, let's, let's go back and look at this. And what I like to call this is the operational awareness horizon. This is coming to a fork in the road. Okay. You are aware, like you're on it. Let's say you're on a long straight road. You see that the road splits ahead about a half a mile to three-quarters of a mile. This is you being aware of the fork in the road. You are not applying the brakes yet. No, you're not turning. Like, you're not yanking on the steering wheel. No, because if you do that, you end up in the ditch.

Yeah.

So this is the time to look further down the road to anticipate, hey, I should be ready when that fork in the road— fine, when I finally get to the fork in the road. Once again, it's not the time to make a change. It is time to be ready to change. It's time to have ideas on what may need change. It's time to start looking at that. So like I said, you don't hit the brakes, you don't turn the steering wheel. Register that the fork is there. You realize that you may have to change course or you may stay the course. But you don't act until data actually demands it. This is what's going to keep the machine running normally while putting your operational sensors on high alert. This is going to prevent the panic lever pulling of just running through and flipping every switch. Um, I, I kind of go back to the, uh, uh, the, the Chernobyl series when they just start flipping switches and pushing buttons, and you're like, yeah, no, no, that's not, that's not what we trained for.

Right.

The other thing I want to look at with that is to is this is part of that fork is saying that you want to be ready for is it's, it's system versus person diagnostic. Ask the employee once again, help me understand what happened here. The process says X, but the result says Y. This is where once again you need to go back to coach, correct, or cut. You also have to look at, is this a leadership problem? This is where you can be proactive. Vague and shifting goalposts, context hoarding, all these types of things. We talked about something where it I mean, really, with one of my employees, I gave a direction and said, do, do the thing. I was getting frustrated as all get out about like the results we were getting.

Yeah.

And then I realized, I'm like, oh, this is, this is because you're giving her about a quarter of the information that she needs. You're not telling her exactly what needs to happen.

Yeah, it, it, you were not clear.

No, I wasn't clear.

Messed up the first C of leadership.

Correct. And the, I mean, the goalposts were, I mean, the goalposts weren't even assembled yet, but she couldn't see them because you tell her what they were. Correct. We had a basketball backboard hanging from half a soccer goal. Yeah.

And you wanted to just do the thing, right?

And I'm telling her to kick a field goal. The— once again, expecting the team to execute on an SOP without understanding— this is the big thing to me— without understanding the why.

Yeah.

Uh, the way my brain works, like, if you give me a rule for an organization and show me why that rule exists, I will follow that rule like it's a commandment.

Yes, I'm similar.

Yeah, if you give me a rule that I think is complete BS—

oh, I ignore it.

I will ignore that like a speed limit sign.

Exactly right.

100%.

It is a suggestion that I am not taking.

Correct.

What?

Yeah, no, this is BS. Why am I— like, this? No, no thanks. I'll get it done better. If you don't share the business context, people— and this is the problem— is people can't pivot when a minor variable shifts, and they, they can't take ownership of any issues when they start to happen. The other thing that I see is a big mistake that we see when we look at system versus person diagnostic is forced overcapacity, operating the team at 110% without building in a monitored buffer. If you sit there and hold your engine at redline all day long, Eventually she can go bang and it's going to be expensive.

Yes.

You're going to be picking up parts of your car with a snow shovel and some kitty litter.

Yeah.

Don't do that to your workers. You can run them at 110% for a very short period of time, but then you have to run them at 60% for a little while so that way they can cool off.

Yeah.

Are you running that at 110% too long? Then the other thing is, is once again failing the mirror test, the model what you mandate. I love when you said that. If you mandate a standard and then fail to provide the ongoing skill training, skill building, tools for it, or don't do the damn thing yourself, guess what? The, the, the person in the mirror is the problem. You cannot demand consistency from a team that you haven't equipped, and you cannot demand consistency from a team when you aren't consistent. Now we've got to look at the pattern.

Thrice— 3 is a pattern.

Yes, 3 is a pattern. Thrice is a system. If the exact same, exact same issue happens a third time after you verified the process is solid, the anomaly has officially graduated into a pattern. I feel like it takes the tassel on its cap and sticks it on the other side. It does.

And I would say give yourself some timing too, 'cause 3 times in 6 years, I don't know, is a pattern.

Correct.

So, correct. Context.

100%. For me, it's that then we start, this is where, what's tough about this is so much of this is rearward-facing. You're seeing this after this happens. And that's why I say at the second time, you start looking at, okay, what are some things that we may, may, not will, may do? So that way when the third time it happens, you've got a pretty good idea of where you're going. Like I said, that the rearward-looking metrics, are the ones where you're going to see this thing. So assess the shift. Like one of the things that I always, that I always look at, like, has our external market changed? Customer base, software tooling, internal capacity changed in a way that our current SOPs just don't work with? Look at what's going through. We talked about this the other day. Fast food. Yeah, the market has just changed significantly. Significantly. And once again, if the entire market is like losing market share, then you have to look at like, what do we do to change markets? Yeah, trying to do the exact same thing better probably isn't going to help you. Adapting over compliance is another thing, is we have to audit the process against these new conditions and adapt that— the standard rather than just forcing compliance. Like, hey, that— it's our favorite saying. We've always done it this way.

I just had a conversation about that today. This is the way we've always done it. I know, and that's why it's no longer working, right? Right, right.

That started in the mid-'80s. Congratulations, those clothes are coming back. If the environment has shifted, redesign the SOP, return to that coaching phase with the employees. If the environment is completely unchanged and the process remains structurally perfect, It's a behavior compliance issue. Yeah, you got, you got people problem. So that's where you hit that decision fork. That is where you start, as we have talked about, one of our favorite things, the sweaty 10-minute conversation. You are no longer talking about the task. You are talking about the consistent failure to follow the standard, which is way easier to coach and correct. 100%. Yes, 100%. The one thing that I— we've talked about the carrot trap. Don't— like, watch out for temporary bursts of good behavior. If you have— if you've dangled a carrot to get them to stop making mistake, they haven't shifted their baseline. No, they are just renting compli— you're just renting compliance. Look for consistent, self-sustaining patterns. You shouldn't need the carrot to get them to do the baseline thing.

No, there's certain times where people say, well, we're going to offer an incentive for our employees to show up on time. No, you're not. Right.

It's called a paycheck.

Called your paycheck. It's called a standard of expectations. No, we are not. You're not going to do that.

When I hear stuff like that, I— we have the talk coming up at the big summit and we're talking about how nobody wants to work anymore.

Yeah.

Yeah, and like, those are the things where they're like, this is what we're going to do, we're going to offer them an incentive to show up on time. And I'm like, no, we have, we have so much to talk about.

You've hired wrong. Let's talk about how you're going to hire people that know how to get to work on time.

Correct. Uh, let's, let's talk about a couple of pieces with this. Like, to me, one of the things that I find is the 15-second pause that in some cases should be a 15-minute or 15-day pause.

Yeah, 15 seconds is not not long enough.

But no, but it's, it's, it's at least something. Uh, why should you take 5 minutes to look at your notes or dashboard before responding to bad news that's gonna prevent you from turning an anomaly into a war?

Well, because most leadership mistakes happen in the first emotional reaction.

Oh gosh, yes.

I mean, that pause. Yeah, that's it. Come on, how many times have you— I, I mean, I can't count them. So that's just, again, learn from us and our mistakes. How many times have you made an absolute disaster of something because you overreacted in the first 15 seconds? I know I can.

I don't have enough fingers, toes, and no, no, I did my best to when someone would call me with a problem, be like, let me look at a couple of things. I'll call you right back.

Yes, I've gotten really good at it now.

And because, yeah, it's that I, it was an emotional circuit breaker for me.

Yeah.

Shut the lights off.

Yeah.

Yes. Okay, let's take a couple of minutes. Like, how does this actually affect things?

Yeah.

Um, good. Like, look at leader's dashboard, like things of that. Take a few minutes to be like, what, what, what are the implications of this?

Yeah, because that pause creates curiosity.

Correct.

That curiosity prevents assumptions.

I've never assumed anything.

Me neither. Me either. I am always objective.

What happens when the leader's the one that's not consistent?

Oh, well, I mean, if your mood changes, the rules— your team stops trusting the rules. Oh, so yeah, I mean, leaders create inconsistency. They often create the inconsistency that they complain about all the time. So when there's like, I don't know why anybody follows— like, doesn't do this, or I don't understand why nobody wants to work here, right? And it's like, what have you created? I don't know why anybody Why doesn't anybody show up on time? Like, what time do you get here? 10:30. What time does work start? 7:30. Okay. Do you maybe want to come in like maybe once a week at that time and say hi to everybody? Like maybe model what you mandate. What time do you leave? 3. Well, what time do you expect everybody else to stay till? 6:30. Like, hmm. Yeah. Let's just, yeah.

It's interesting for me because what I found is I've got a great story about this. What, like, if a leader bypasses SOPs, and the one that I got at a company that I worked at for a very short period of time was just squeeze this in.

Uh-huh.

Like no other, no other deadlines could move. And what this was is I still remember this. It was at a video, video production company. The, the people we would work with approved the script. I was an on-camera personality. I'd do the script. Yeah, it— we'd edit it, we'd get everything done, and they'd be like, they need to change things in the script. And the problem is, is the— like, the project would be due on Thursday. We got it done, we're like rock stars, we got it done Wednesday before we left. Thursday morning we come in and like, this needs to be reshot.

Excuse me, right?

'Uh, we've got 3 other shoots scheduled today. Just fit it in.' Fit it into what?

Yeah.

And once again— and so it— once again, if you constantly move deadlines, if you constantly move procedures, no one's gonna— like, no one's gonna have any clue what's a mistake and what's not.

Exactly.

And we just got to the point where we're like, 'Okay, the schedule doesn't matter. It's just whatever's there. Everything Everything's an 11 because it's completely unpredictable, and trust requires predictability.

Yep.

Do you— have you ever kept a, like, a notepad of weird occurrences? No. Okay.

I, I just— you—

no, I, I usually— because I've got a weird memory for stuff.

I do too. That's why I don't— yeah, that's a trauma response. I don't need— I've got it in my brain. I don't need a puck for those.

Let's be honest, you did not start your business so you could spend your days buried in HR paperwork or Googling how to handle employee drama.

That's why I started Clarity HR. We're your fractional HR team, giving you real people, real support, and real solutions. Whether it's compliance headaches, hiring struggles, or just needing someone to take the people stuff off your plate. We've got your back.

So if you're ready to stop using duct tape and hope as your HR strategy and finally get some peace of mind, head over to clarityhr.com.

That's clarityhr.com. Simple, clear, and here to help.

I'll give you a few seconds to go to the website while we get ready to get back to the show. I spent enough time perseverating on this and having to work through this in my head and not do anything about it, that I'm going to remember this forevermore.

Yeah, trust me, I don't have a problem with it, but I think there could be— there's a case for it.

100%. And I like— we're, we're strange.

Yeah, we're wired different.

We are wired differently. But in the same sense, like, I do try to keep— when something happens, I try to make a mental note of a date. And I try to make a mental note of exactly what did happen and the information that I got, because as long as I can go back and refer to that, what, what happens is I, I see so many people that are just like, I think something happened at a point in time about a thing.

Mm-hmm.

And it probably wasn't the thing. Neil deGrasse Tyson does a great talk on how our memories are horrible for most people. Yeah, we remember what we want to, how we want to remember it. And absolutely, if it's related to something else, You're going to be like, this mistake has happened 4 times. No, it's probably been 4 slightly different mistakes. Just because you're thinking of it right now, it's that, that way. Now, what I will say is if you're going to do something like this, a single line, a date, who, what happened, and system or person, which one was it? Google Keep, Microsoft Notes. Yeah, I love these items, especially if you're in production. 100%.

Yeah, you can manufacturing, production, those types of things where you've got—

they're on your phone.

Yep.

You type it in, you put it as a voice note in there and just one sheet. I use voice notes for stuff like that all the time. I mean, people see me, I—

Incident log, something like.

Yes, it's an, I go into, there's an incident log or whatever. And then I just create a new line for it. And then I know what's there. You can just do it as, you just need something that's, something that has a record of this somewhere. So that way you can look back and be like, oh yeah, that is how that happened. It was Bob. It wasn't Bill. It was just those things. So those details don't slip through. Key action, like key takeaways, some actionable things. What's, what's a big one for you?

Stay curious longer.

I love that.

Don't let one moment define the whole story.

Oh, very good.

Don't like put your cape down too. I think a lot of times we jump in the middle and make a conclusion.

Because this is my chance to be a hero.

That's exactly right. Check your ego at the door.

I'll save the day.

Save the day. No, you will not. You'll make it worse.

Correct.

What about for you?

To me, that, that friction log of sort— and once again, I, I want to warn people with this— don't document to punish. Bob, this is the fourth time this has happened. That's, that's not why you're documenting. No, it's— you're, you're not documenting this for HR. You're documenting this for production. A running bullet point list of operational hiccups. It doesn't necessarily need to have Bob's name in it every single time. Just realize that.

Yeah. And I would say seek context before correction. The explanation matters just as much as the event does. Yeah.

Don't assume that they just screwed off that day.

No. Ask, you know, help me understand.

If a mistake had to me, if your mistake happens and you're at a 7 or 8 on your anger level, You are operationally barred from speaking to anyone involved with this. Yeah. For 2 hours. Be like, look, I need to do some research. Meaning, hey, I need to go have a cup of coffee, maybe a cold shower, get the shampoo out of my hair.

Yeah, I'm going to take a walk.

Correct. Correct.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I would say earn the conclusion because the conclusion, it should come from evidence, not emotion. We got to earn it.

This is the one that's the tough one for me. One of the last actionable things.

Yes.

Before you start correcting a behavioral pattern, ask yourself, have I provided the documented tools and support required to make success repeatable? In other words, am I the problem? And you got to be honest about it.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah, you gotta be honest about it. Here's, here's a, here's one that I was really excited to talk about. How do you handle a client who's got a pattern of breaking your processes? Because I know you've experienced that, and I, like, for me, I know we've had a problem with it, with a couple of them.

Yeah, it's the same way we handle it with employees. I mean, you know, one time is a conversation, a pattern requires boundaries. So, you know, healthy relationships require accountability and If they're a prospect, we, we just don't allow it. So that's the other part is like you, you coach the client before they become your client on what the expectations are.

Yeah, I like when we were— when I saw that we were going to talk about this question, I was like, my answer is a little curt. We handle like if a client breaks our processes because I'm a process-oriented guy, We don't. We don't work with them. Yeah, we like— I want to work with people and I like to me, I love looking at our processes to see if they need changed for a circumstance or to see like how we can improve on them. Yeah, we're not your bitch.

No. And here's the other part, because of some of the things that we do, we're like, we're not going to discriminate or commit fraud on your behalf, employer. I'm sorry. You know, I know that we— yeah, we don't meet participation. Can you just fudge the numbers for the benefits? No, we cannot. Right. Well, why not? Like, find another agent that will break those rules for you. Because I'm sorry, we have hundreds of other clients that would like us to stay licensed. So no.

And in business.

And in business. I mean, do you want to tell my family why we lost our insurance license? Because you thought you were special and didn't have to follow the rules?

No. I'm special, just like everybody else.

I will fight them. Like, you are not, you are not our client. You can't do that.

I've seen Chrissy angry. Don't do that. Is a bad attitude an anomaly or a pattern if it only shows up on Monday? This to me, I love.

Well, I think if it's every Monday, it's a pattern. But the question becomes, what is Monday trying to tell us? So, and for some people, it's they spent way too much time with their family over the weekend and they just need to get back to work. Candidly. And for other ones, it's like, wait a second, what do we— what— where is the stress level and what are the things that they're walking into on Monday?

So I, I— to me, 100%, it is a pattern. It's only bad enough that you see it on Monday.

Yeah, that's true too.

It's the same pattern every other day, it's just not so blatant that you see it every other day. What's the, uh, this is what's— I love this. What's one operational tool? Let's put Chrissy Myers in my world. That makes tracking patterns easiest for a 5-person team.

That's like a notebook or the Notes app on your phone. Like, it doesn't have to be hard. That's my thought.

Yeah.

No, I—

and for me, it's Sheets.

That's amazing to me that you say Sheets.

Really?

Like, out of all the tools in the world. No, it's simple.

It's good. Sheets, I love. Everything about Sheets. The amount of data that I can get out of stupid— like a 3-column whatever. Yeah, I just— I— Sheets is just my— it's like my—

I've ever seen you that excited.

No, if like, like if there's an option to do my iRacing game or build a spreadsheet, I'm in the spreadsheet.

Really? Oh yeah. Okay.

Oh yeah, all day long. Wow. All day long.

Feel like I learned something new.

Give, give, Give me the data.

Okay, I heard that.

That being said, if you haven't been scared off yet today, thank you for sticking around. We really appreciate everyone that's coming along for the ride. Do us a big, big, big favor. First off, give us a review. We've been seeing a lot of comments too on the social medias, which have been amazing. It's, it's really kind of— I, I'm I love the fact that I hear that we're helping so many people.

Yes. Or validating that.

Yeah. I'm also horrified by the number of employees that I have heard from over the past couple of weeks.

Yes.

Like, my boss needs to hear this. And please, by all means, tag them. Tag your boss. Send this to your boss. If you need us to send it, we might find—

I'm happy to.

Yeah, we'll find a way to send this to your boss. We would love to be able to do that for you. Maybe that's our We may have to work on that. Yeah, uh, go to businessfixpodcast.com for us. By all means, do us a favor, take care of yourself. If you can, take care of someone else too. We will see you very, very soon.

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