WHAT TO DO WHEN A
DIGITAL TEAM MEMBER
MAKES A MISTAKE
by Laura Pennington
I
t can be frustrating and overwhelming to realize that one of your digital team members has
made a mistake. In fact, this is one of the most
common reasons that people end up firing a virtual assistant and being hesitant about outsourcing
anything ever again.
To begin with as online entrepreneurs, we are used
to handling everything ourselves, but hopefully
there will come a point when you can no longer
do everything yourself and you may outsource
portions of your business including social media
management, content creation, graphic design,
website development and many other aspects that
are essential to running an online business today.
If any of these tools or if any of these tasks are not
in your zone of genius, then it’s strongly recommended that you hire somebody else to help you
with them. However, this can be disconcerting
when the person makes a mistake. Here is how to
handle the situation- because guess what? It will
happen. No one’s perfect, you included.
STEP 1
HAND
FIND AN IMMEDIATE SOLUTION TO THE PROBLEM AT
In the heat of the moment you need to find the
most effective and efficient solution. This may
mean removing the task from the responsibility of
the person to whom it was originally assigned. You
may need to do it yourself or you may need to ask
someone also in your team to step in and handle
the situation.
Bear in mind that an immediate solution is not a
permanent one and it does not have to be perfect.
For example, if the opt in on your website crashes
and you don’t have time to redesign an entirely
new opt in come up with a basic template that
can sit there in the interim and get things fixed in a
couple of days.
Finding an immediate solution will dispel some
of your anxiety around this situation and give you
some more time to figure out a better solution and
to begin investigating what’s involved in the next
step.
STEP 2
CLARIFY WHAT WENT
WRONG
There are any number of reasons why a task or
a project may fall apart when it’s in the hands of
someone else. Perhaps there is something going
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