My Big Screw Up: The Aftermath

Several of you asked that I write a follow-up to my last post. (If you didn’t have a chance to read about my latest leadership screw up, you can check it out here.) And so yesterday, while I was sitting on a plane that was about to take off, I had an idea: What if I had my team write the follow-up instead of me? I asked a few members of our executive team to reflect on how it felt the day I set our unattainable revenue goals. I also asked them to describe how it felt the next day, when I admitted my failure and reset our revenue goals to numbers that were actually possible.  

Here are their reflections! Hope you’ll enjoy reading from their perspective. I also hope it shows that the actions we take—or don’t take—as leaders truly do impact our people more than we can ever imagine.

XOXO

Kristen

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Rachel:

We've recently made some really (really) big changes at our company, and though things have been stressful the last several months, I think we'd all agree that they've also been great. I actually said to someone last week, "Right now, Student Maid is the most Student Maid Student Maid has ever been." Which, I recognize, doesn't make a ton of sense, but what I meant is that I think we've finally found our groove. As a company, we've never been better; it just feels right. So it didn't surprise me when Kristen came to our revenue meeting last week with goals that were a little ambitious. To me, it made sense that she would want to seize this new energy we have and funnel it into generating more money so we can keep our momentum going and keep making Student Maid better.

But I also knew there was no freakin' way we'd be hitting those goals. We'd be lucky to even get close to hitting them. I wasn't looking forward to the inevitable disappointment, but I also wasn't afraid of it. When we don't hit revenue goals, heads don't roll. Instead, we sit down as a team, reflect, and try to figure out how to do better next time. I knew that as long as we made enough money to keep the lights on, pay our people, and support our culture, there'd be no harm done.

When Kristen came in the next day and told us she'd reconsidered the goals, I was surprised: I was totally not expecting that. We'd always overshot our goals a little bit, and when we inevitably fell short, we were bummed but we knew we probably made more money than we would have if we hadn't tried. But I'm so glad we're not reaching for the moon this time around. There's so much going right in our company right now that I would hate for a too-high goal to be the thing that began to unravel it. Money has never been the most important thing at Student Maid, and it didn't make sense to create goals that forced us to put it at the forefront. I'm looking forward to meetings where we smile when we talk about revenue instead of cringe. I know they're coming, and I can't wait.

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Amanda:

When we delved into the financial side of the company last week, I went into the discussion the same way I usually do ("Let’s do this but I also can’t wait for the day to end!"). In the 2.5 years I’ve been with Student Maid, I personally don’t prefer these conversations because they can be overwhelming. I know money isn’t everything, but we need to make money so everyone can keep the jobs they love!

We always set lofty goals—and we definitely try to reach them—but it can be deflating when we realize we didn’t even come close. The pros and cons of working for a company you love and fully support is that sometimes you don’t question things or speak up. You just trust your boss or the people around you that you trust fully, so if no one is saying anything, maybe it’s okay and maybe this is the norm. I did speak up about my concerns but I didn't know how to articulate in the moment how I was feeling. I said something along the lines that it would be really hard and almost impossible to reach our targets in the coming weeks, and that we needed more time to even have a chance of hitting them. I got some words of encouragement, so I left it at that. After work though, my brain was still on work because I had to brainstorm how I was going to reach our new goals. The only two conclusions I came to were: 1) I could work double the amount of hours and be exhausted in the coming weeks or 2) We could just fail again. It’s always okay in the end, right? Well, since both of those options sucked, I planned to say something the next day.

Kristen beat me to it. She was feeling crummy about it too but used her strengths to spin it into something great and make a change. It was a relief the next day to feel like we had an actionable plan to work towards our goals and also a feeling that we could actually reach our goals. The best part was that we wouldn’t have to take our work home with us or lose sleep to reach them. (It’s not that I personally don’t like to take work home! It’s just that work/life balance is important to all of us at Student Maid and I know my team wants that too.)

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Monique:

Talking about goals and deadlines as a company is always exhausting! We are always striving for bigger and better things which is great, but when you aren’t the best at celebrating wins it can constantly feel like we aren’t doing enough. Our financial conversation about our revenue goals felt productive at the start. As we dove into the nitty gritty of what our new targets should be, it felt like a blast from the past. Tension started to rise slightly but no one was addressing the elephant in the room. In some regards it felt like we were being asked what the goals should be and then just “corrected” with what they actually should be.

To come into the office the next morning and have Kristen apologize felt like a huge relief. Sometimes it can feel like your leader wants to trust your judgement/say on things but their actions say the complete opposite. That's what the day before had felt like. We are in the weeds every day. We are doing the tasks day in and day out to inform what is and isn’t possible. But when it came time to set a goal that was both realistic but also challenging, it seemed like our say was no longer valuable in the conversation.

Kristen’s passion for growth was well intentioned but in that conversation it felt like recanted trust. Recalibrating the goals to something we believed were absolutely doable gave us a sense of ownership over making sure we hit them because at the end of the day, we all agreed they were possible. It finally felt like a goal we could all rally around and own up to if it didn’t happen the way that we hoped. Sometimes a team needs to be challenged. But just past challenging is a slippery slope of frustration that arises from setting goals that the team doesn’t believe in and no longer has ownership in. Goals that they no longer feel excited to work towards. When the goal is too high, you lose the excitement of ever getting to say you not only hit the goal but you exceeded it! Isn’t that what everyone wants to be able to say?