Episode #194: If You Are Wrong Fess Up

Mistakes are either great learning exercises or catastrophes damaging the trust in the brand. Step one is getting people to admit they made a mistake. Finding out about a major mistake when it is too late is every bosses nightmare. You have the authority, the power the money to fix it, but that window has closed out.

Sometimes things go wrong. Mistakes are made, errors pop up, best laid plans are laid low. Stuff happens. How we deal with these incidents makes the big difference. Some societies are legalistic, litigious and phalanxes of lawyers are lined up telling us to deny everything. Japan isn’t one of those cases, so we expect a different way of doing things here and admitting blame is accepted, as long as it is handled appropriately.

Troublesome word “appropriately”. It is a bit like “common sense” which often proves to be very uncommon. What we may think is appropriate isn’t shared by others. This is where things get murky in the service sector world. When things go wrong what is the appropriate response by both parties? The aggrieved client can completely lose it and let go with both verbal barrels, tearing strips off the offending service provider.

Given nearly thirty percent of the Japanese population is over sixty five these days, we can all look forward to various short fuse jichans or granddads exploding with rage, when some level of service is not delivered at the “appropriate” level. Those long Japanese life spans, combined with ever shortening tempers and easy irritation from other people creates an explosive service sector cocktail.

A friend of mine was lamenting some poor service provision in the IT area. The project was nine months late and when it did finally come on line it didn’t work properly at all. We all know that everything in IT takes longer than promised and always costs more than expected, but at least it is supposed to work. There can be many reasons for this. The brief may have been unclear, the execution could have been the problem, there may be extenuating circumstances, maybe it was basic incompetence?

When I was working at one of the retail banks here a very, very large amount of money had been carted out to sea on a barge and set on fire, in the form of a new internal operating platform not working well at all. It was launched then immediately scrapped. The autopsy of why it didn’t work, became one of those failure orphans, where there was no one responsible. No one lost their job and no lessons were learnt. It was like it never happened, everyone involved suddenly had collective amnesia and it was quietly swept under a rug and forgotten.

Anyway, back to my friend who was rather perplexed by the reaction of the IT service provider, who was not at all responsive. Magically, the perpetrator of this grief managed to switch the tables around and blame my friend for being the problem. Now this reaction is puzzling? Why would you take that path?

Not answering the plaintive emails, texts and phone calls gets aggrieved people worked up. They feel slighted and frustrated at the same time. So lesson number one is make yourself easy to reach to solve the problems. Is your name there on your website to be contacted, if people have an issue with your service and they want to complain directly to the boss? In my experience, our Japanese staff are all ninjas at hiding trouble from the boss, so always expect to be the last to know what has occurred, usually until it is absolutely too late.

Also don’t be mealy-mouthed about the problem. If you didn't deliver from the buyer’s point of view, then admit it, because the beauty or otherwise is in the eye of the beholder here. Perception is the key and that is to say the perception of the client. There is money involved obviously, but there is something much more valuable involved and that is trust.

If you want to try and wriggle your way out of your responsibilities, as was the case on this occasion, then expect bigger ramifications down the road. My friend is very well connected and will not be speaking highly of the services of this provider to any and all who will listen. That will become an invisible cost line in the P&L, where revenues are being negatively impacted by reputation damage. You cannot necessarily see it, but you can be assured it will be there.

I am reminded of another case, where a very “sharp” businessman I know has quite a big following on the Internet. Various people who feel they have been duped, have created some scintillating reading on the internet, whenever you Google his name. When people are looking to do business with you, this type of prominent, smelly baggage will hurt you forever.

It is surprising how some people don’t take any responsibility for poor service. My son had a bowl of sauce spilt all over him at a ramen shop in the Azabu Juban recently. The waitress was Asian, not Japanese. To everyone’s astonishment she did nothing, just stood there looking quizzical, seemingly wondering to herself “now how did that happen?” No apology, no frantic provision of towels to soak up the sauce, absolutely nothing.

The Japanese manager was busy apologising, eventually providing the towels and wiping up the catastrophe. The guilty party just went back to grilling some meat like nothing had happened. Maybe she didn’t speak Japanese or English or was just stupid? Who knows what was going on inside her mind?

Luckily for her, it wasn’t some short tempered jichan she spilt the sauce over, as I am sure she would have been given a severe tongue lashing, the manager would have been given a good serve too and it would have turned into quite a public imbroglio. When departing, only the manager came outside to bow and apologise at the door. Where was the errant staff member, who should have been standing there looking contrite and sorry for the kerfuffle?

The point here is we all know that things will go wrong and yet how well have we trained our staff to take responsibility for their mistakes? This young woman had been given no guidance at all and yet here she is working in a retail food environment, where accidents are bound to happen. She may be part of that foreign, low pay, hourly “trainee” brigade that will increasingly be called upon to staff Japan’s restaurants, shops and retail outlets, but so what? They still need to be trained and prepared to work in one of the most demanding retail environments in the world, where standards are high and forgiveness is low.

This is a good time to take another look at what we are doing in our companies to prepare ourselves and our staff for mistakes, incidents, accidents, chaos and trouble. We can’t rely on people’s common sense or their capacity to take “appropriate” action. We need to tell them clearly the WHY of what we are doing. We need to explain our VALUES and we need to train them on how to respond to trouble, as viewed through the eyes of the aggrieved client. We also have to keep telling them because even though we may get sick of saying it, they need to hear it all the time for it to sink in. If we can’t get this right and our competitors can, then we are in deep trouble.