Don’t make a bigger mistake

Sometimes you will execute something perfectly, yet another person might think you’ve made a mistake. Depending on who that is, it might be worth owning up to your “mistake” rather than making a bigger one by trying to correct them.

In his pursuit of excellence, Danny Meyer shares these thoughts in the book “ Unreasonable Hospitality “, which in this case relates to how a restaurant treats their patrons:

We needed to make sure we were serving our guests, not our egos; as Danny Meyer says, “Being right is irrelevant.” So instead of explaining what a true medium-rare looks like, we needed to say, “Absolutely, sir, I’m sorry,” before getting the guest a steak cooked exactly the way he wanted it cooked.

If you’ve corrected a guest because you don’t want them to think you’ve made a mistake, you’ve made a much bigger mistake.

You might bring out the perfect steak, cooked exactly as it was ordered, but if it’s not what they expected then your best move is to apologize and make it right. This doesn’t apply every time, as we’ve all come across people that can never be pleased, but it’s a good rule to live by.

This carries across many different disciplines. As we’re building a website for a client, we need to make sure our expectations are aligned so that they’re not surprised by the final outcome. In…