The Problem Was My Expectation That People Won't Make Mistakes

I used to expect that people in the call center could enter 100 claims a day and not make any mistakes. I used to get mad at them if they didn’t meet that expectation. I told their supervisor that he should get better people and make them do their work correctly. When I came back to that company a few years later, I had learned that the problem was not that they made mistakes. The problem was my expectation that they wouldn’t. I knew that I didn’t need to find better people, I needed to change my expectations. I still wanted the claims to be paid correctly. So I audited the claims to find and correct any errors. That worked better than getting mad at people. Eventually, our software was enhanced so that it didn’t allow most of the errors we used to make. That worked even better.

Doing the Right Thing
and Achieving All Your Goals at the Same Time
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