Sorry About That

I have had over twenty wonderful years of professional experience with many great people. I think that the best part about writing these weekly articles is that each week I hear from one or more of you who are reading along. I appreciate and adore each and every one of you and I want to thank you for your feedback.

One of the more important things I have learned over my career is to be more appreciative of other people. Acknowledging other people’s contributions, feedback, efforts and words is very important.

My communication skills early in my career needed some work. I think that I might be overly kind to myself in that assessment. If you read some of my early emails, you would be tempted to try to self-disinfect your eyeballs or send it to a nearby diocese and ask if they had anyone to spare for an exorcism. It is not that I was bad with words; I was not. I knew the power of words. I just enjoyed weaponizing them as a part of my nine-to-five. It was not clear to me that this would be something that I would later come to regret.

Today, I am a much more different beast. When I need to communicate something important, I often set aside a lot of time to craft the message. I talked previously about “coaching sandwiches” and setting a positive tone. I may not have talked about customer experience yet, but I also took something really valuable away from another unexpected source of education. Quite a bit of my communications education experience came from talking to customer service people at American Express.

Maybe this is an entire article all on itself, but I have had to call American Express a considerable number of times over the length of time I have been a card member. When I worked in enterprise sales, I learned that a number of successful sales people possess a high end American Express card. My initial reaction to that was the same as seeing gold trim on a luxury car; it is tacky and ostentatious. Nonetheless I was inspired to play along and sign up for my own since I was on a team with a good track record. I will say I have come to fall in love with my American Express card, and no, they are not paying me for an endorsement. At least not yet. The most important moments for me with my American Express card were when they failed me in some capacity and I called them to let them know.

I am most appreciative of the person who crafted the customer service scripts at American Express. I don’t know if it is a full time person, or if they hired some hoity-toity consulting organization to do it. Either way, when I am on the phone with them as a disgruntled customer or frustrated individual with a frozen card, they have a profound magical effect of making me feel better at the same time as they fix my problem.

It starts with a pretty simple gesture: The people I am on the phone with are very quick to apologize for the situation.

When my kids were much younger, I traveled frequently enough to other parts of the country with my family that it triggered regular fraud notifications on my card. An interesting aside, I lived far enough away from a Walmart when I was living with my family in Davis, California, that my card showing up at a Walmart in Irvine, or even in East Bay trying to find hard-to-find Christmas merchandise was clearly a sign that there was some sort of fraud occurring. I assure you there is nothing more frustrating than trying to resolve a diaper crisis, or get some nearly-out-of-stock Christmas “must have” toy, than to  suddenly have your card declined because the circumstances of purchase are suspicious. That is right folks, I was being ‘sus’ way before Among Us was ever published as a game.

In order to move ahead with the transaction I have often had to get on the phone with someone from American Express to let them know that, yes, I am indeed me, and yes, I am indeed trying to buy something that triggered a fraud alert.

From the time that I get stink-eye from the massive line of people behind me to the time I have someone on the phone, I have already stoked a furious rage that burns with the blazing intensity of a thousand suns.

And yet, the soothing voice of a concerned professional calmly apologizing for the situation takes me out of the danger zone and returns everything to normal.

This happened enough times that I began to realize this is a super-power.

So naturally, I decided to try it myself.

I began to start apologizing for things just to see what it was like. I was shocked at what a difference it made in how my messages were received.

Even to this day, you might find that a good percentage of my emails will include a permutation of the sentence:

“Thank you for your message and I am sorry for the delayed reply”.

I found that people are very receptive to gratitude and consideration.

There is a school of thought for people in the executive suite not to introduce that level of contrition and ownership to an issue, that it is a form of weakness and vulnerability. I think that the “brogrammer” culture of many startups in silicon valley is at the heart of this. I have decided that it certainly is one way to do things, but it is not mine.

I was directed by a thoughtful coworker at Zynga to read the works of Brené Brown, who talks about authenticity and vulnerability in leadership and it resonated with what I had learned from American Express and my previous history of communication-as-warfare.

I encourage you to read her book “Dare to Lead”. At some point I will pre-link these people and their books instead of sending you into the internet on your own. I do not yet feel the need to set up an affiliate link to profit from your readership.

When that day comes, I just want you to know one thing:

I will be sorry for the inconvenience.