Latest / Travel Agency in a Year / Day 249: Review a Rough Travel Agency Quarter Without Playing the Blame Game
Transcript
- Rachel: Welcome to the Travel Agency in a Year podcast. I'm your host, Rachel K, travel agency owner, helping you all with this free podcast. Let's do it. Let's build real awesome freaking businesses and quit our day jobs. I don't know what your goals are. Probably that. Today is day 249. What's the lesson instead of whose fault when there are bad quarterly reviews? Every quarter has at least one thing that didn't go the way you wanted it. Because life is not a dream. Anyone who's telling you my life is perfect and great all of the time is lying to you. So we're going to talk about how a CEO actually reviews the at least one thing that didn't go well without spiraling into blame. whether that blame lands on you yourself, if you have any team members or assistants that, clients, circumstances outside of your control, blaming the suppliers. Let's not play the blame game is the goal of this episode. And you might be thinking, I would never you might, so listen to this episode. So you can catch yourself and be like, good night, nurse. I am doing it. So blame always feels productive because it gives any discomfort you have somewhere to go. So there's that. it also rarely produces anything of use because it stops like any sort of resolution way too early. This is my fault, or this is their fault, pointing the finger is the end. The end. You don't need to think about it anymore. And then nothing changes and then you're like, Well how come I'm not successful? hm. But what's the lesson here is just the beginning. It keeps you looking at the actual mechanics of everything that happened and everyone involved in what happened instead of just assigning a verdict and moving on. A verdict, case closed. Also, I want to get the du-dut law and order gabble. I might order that. I'm not gonna do it. But maybe I will. Anyway, Verdic closes the case. A lesson opens up the next quarter to not have it happen again. there's a really well-known concept in high-stakes industries like aviation and healthcare. I have friends in both, and I know some of you listening might work in one. It's like a just culture approach to reviewing mistakes. The goal of a review isn't to find someone to punish, it's to understand the actual conditions and decisions that led to an outcome so that the system itself can improve. Airlines that investigate any sort of incidents this way, they are focused on the process rather than punishment. And the airlines that do it this way have measurably safer track records over time than industries that default to blame first. The same principle applies to the scale of the small business owner, like a travel advisor. A review focused on genuine understanding produces better decisions going forward than one that just assigns fault to someone. Let's talk about a simple reframe for reviewing what went wrong. For anything in this quarter or future quarters, whatever that didn't work, a launch that didn't do well. We've been talking about this the last few episodes. I feel like I'm repeating myself. Client issues. You lost followers on social, I don't know, you have a private Facebook group and you lost a bunch of people in there unsubs from your email. Ask three questions instead of one. What specifically happened in concrete factual terms? No emotion behind it. What happened? What, question number two, if anything, was within your own control in that moment, and what genuinely wasn't? You cannot control if people choose to unsubscribe from your email newsletter, but you control what's being sent in that email newsletter. Maybe your goal was to get people to unsubscribe because you're like, I have too many misaligned people in my newsletter that aren't following my processes but just taking my free information. Hmm. So that might have been a goal. Anyway, question number three. What would I do differently with what I know now, given the same situation again? If I get the same kind of client again and they start signaling that they're gonna behave the way this weird client situation happened, what can you put in place to prevent them from going down that path? What kind of new boundary can you put in place? What kind of little thing can you add to your TNCs to prevent that from ever happening again? Notice that that last question doesn't ask whose fault is it? It asks for a specific and forward-looking adjustment to avoid it in the future. That's the difference between a review that produces guilt and lack of self-worth feelings and a review that produces growth. Guilt tends to loop. You replay that same moment over and over and over and over without it turning it into anything like usable. A genuine lesson once you've actually named it and you know what you're gonna do differently next time, and you're like, this is this was the only way this could happen. Like this we did the everyone in this situation did the best we could do. But it lets you set that moment down. Not keep it in that short-term memory. We're going to talk about that with some trauma here in a second. Because you've extracted what it had to teach you. So, fun fact what I have learned about trauma. The PTSD, maybe CPTSD is involved as well, if you care. You know. If you're in that kind of a situation mentally, because deep in your brain, that scenario loops over and over and over again. And it's far worse than rumination. So rumination is like tied to anxiety. but rumination is a major point because it cannot, your brain, the limbic system is like so. misfiring from the experience that happened that I can't fully process the memory and pull it out of short term and put it into long-term storage. So it's it starts to be on guard like you are still in this memory live right now. Even if it was like 10 years ago you're still like your your deep subconscious is like this is still happening. This is still a threat, right? And that's why if you've ever known like any combat veterans that have PTSD, that's why certain sounds can trigger them until they're like fully treated, which there's been so many advancements for this in treatment. certain environments can set off that person because their lizard brain responds with chemical responses like, alarm bells, this is going on again. And it's the same thing, like we don't want this happening in our business, right? You're going to run into these issues and instead of closing it and be like, it's their fault, then that just sticks in your brain, right? And then then you start playing the victim mentality and nothing actually gets done and there is no growth and progress. Because you haven't treated the actual issue, you're just kind of masking the symptom and being like, it's everyone else's fault. If you actually can get it out of that over and over and over again loop. Then you know that there is a lesson there to be learned. If the setback involves someone on your team, like a VA, employee, whatever, this reframe matters even more, and it's worth having an actual kind of like general script for it. Instead of opening a conversation of, well, why did this happen? Which tends to trigger the defensiveness. Don't worry, my degree also involves communication. I love communication. But if you're like, why did this happen? Which makes them defensive immediately and not feel like you guys are even a team, you can just say something like, Can you walk me through what happened from your perspective? Like what happened here? And let them narrate the sequence of events before you offer any interpretation of your own. If you are in a situation where you feel like you've done this a few times with a team member and you need to really step in and lead, you can say, here's what I'm seeing. but together you can ask the same lesson-focused question either way. Given what we both know, and you've walked me through it, and here's what I'm seeing, what would we want to do differently next time? So the whose fault mentality tends to produce defensiveness, quietly erose trust over time. if you do have team members, they start hiding the small mistakes rather than surfacing them, which means you lose visibility into exactly the information that you need to actually improve. What's the lesson? when you're asking together genuinely with your teammates, with your clients, whatever, without an already decided verdict, tends to produce honest problem solving and keeps that relationship intact for the next quarter while also helping your team more likely to come to you with problems early before they become the bigger problems. when it's genuinely your own decision and it didn't pan out, mmm, that's gonna happen too. When it's genuinely your fault. Sometimes the setback traces back cleanly to a decision that you intentionally made, a niche that you chose to pursue, a partnership you entered, a price you set, a boundary you let slide. Here, self-directed blame is just as unproductive as blaming someone else. The lesson-focused version could sound more like: okay, given the information I had at the time, this was a reasonable decision. Here's the new information this quarter surfaced, and here's the specific adjustment that information points to. I did this. After I was like, boundaries are so important. And then I had a wedding client who I signed on, and then I increased my fees, and they wanted to increase their package. And I decided, I'll just give you the original pricing. Even though on the consultation I told them originally, my fees are increasing. Choose wisely now. And I still did it anyway because I was like, I could use that income right now. And that was not a good decision. And I knew it was not a good decision. And I was like, I know I gotta suffer the consequences of these actions. I was not gonna be pretending. You do not pretend the decision didn't happen or dodge responsibility for it. And you just be accountable. Don't collapse into like self punishment. Because that's going to leave you hesitant to make bold decisions in the future. Just be like, yep, I made this decision, and it was not a good one. And now I'm never doing that again. So some setbacks are largely outside of your control, like broader economic shifts, industry disruptions. we all know like the resorts getting bought out by other companies, and then everything changes. A client's personal circumstances change, a global event may be affecting travel. If you have that stewardship mindset towards your business, you're responsible for tending it well, this business. You're not responsible for controlling outcomes that were never fully yours to begin with. the lesson in these cases might simply be about like how you responded instead of reacted, how quickly you adapted. How you communicated with any affected clients, what buffer flexibility you've built in afterwards, rather than preventing something that was never preventable in the first place. You can't know everything. Whose fault? Replace that with what's the lesson here? Period. Use the three question structure. This is the TLDR of this episode. What happened? What was in my control? What would I have do differently moving forward if I had this scenario again? That's for any setbacks involving yourself, your team, anything outside anyone's control. So you stop the blame game and you get rid of the drama because playing the victim and getting all emotional and all up in your feelings about your business is very dramatic. we're gonna go to the other side of the review tomorrow when there's like so much good going on and you're like, I'm the best person ever. Calm down. You need to be even, good or bad. Have a wonderful day. I will see you tomorrow.