I had to make a bit of an embarrassing phone call yesterday. I metaphorically dropped the ball. A parent needed permission to get a student signed up for an online course and had tried to contact me a few times. I never got back to her. She had a similar (but not the same) first name as another parent I was dealing with, and her son wanted a similar (but not the same) course as the other parent’s son. I still mixed them up, thought they were asking about the same issue, and only responded to the latter parent. The error was due to a careless error on my part… 100% my fault.
I remember the day last week when I dealt with the other family, then saw a message from my secretary after the fact and thought, ‘Oh, I just dealt with that’, brushing off the message rather than reading it fully.
Considering the first message from this parent was the week before last, maybe even the week before that, she’d been waiting quite a while. When I called at the end of the day today, I was expecting to speak to an upset person. I introduced myself and immediately apologized for my lack of timely communication.
The response I got was a parent happy to have finally reached me, and she immediately explained the situation. As it turns out, this was a situation that was clear cut and actually didn’t even need my approval. I explained how she could register, and gave the name and number of my secretary to connect with if she had any issues. I followed up with an email, and also let all my secretaries know that this person might call for help today, if she had any registration issues.
Yesterday was a long day of back-to-back-to-back-to-back meetings that left me with gaps of under 20 minutes of free time to get things done from 8:20am to almost 4pm. I did have a long and enjoyable lunch meeting in there, but that was also a working lunch, and so I couldn’t even look at my growing inbox the whole day.
Seeing the message about this parent and realizing my mistake was something that made me want to crawl under a rock as I sat at my desk at almost 5pm. But I figured this poor parent had waited long enough and I’d just take the complaint hit on the chin before heading home. Instead, I was pleasantly surprised to hear a relieved parent who recognized that I was going to help her son get registered for the course he’d been waiting for.
Interactions like this just want me to pay it forward. I’m left wondering how I can engage with someone else in a more positive way? How can I interact with someone in a better way than they were expecting? How can I provide an unexpected positive interaction with someone when that’s not what they’d expect from me?
