What happens when you have a good team making mistakes? Well we laugh at ourselves, offer grace, and find clever ways to fix it. Yesterday our highly talented marketer, @Rebecca Milner, accidentally sent a drafted email to our 15k subscribers.

When I say drafted I mean it had missing titles, wrong graphic, copy from a previous email, and broken links. It was a placeholder email to work on later. Here is what it looked like.

What I love was how she responded, immediately she texts me and owns it. Thankfully we were all on a zoom stand up so she can see my face at the time which was me laughing at how funny it was. The team picked up on what had happened and went straight to lifting up her up.

At then end of everyone’s stand up someone would say “sorry Rebecca”. I’m laughing, they are being empathetic. Both had a place at the time. It was a good moment. Then, we jumped in and encouraged her to send a follow up apologizing to our audience.

And because Rebecca is extremely good at her job, she wrote a hilarious follow up that led to a lot of engagements. Here is the “punny” email.

Here is the engagement we got from people emailing back.

We then celebrated the responses and reminded ourselves that we aren’t perfect, we can own mistakes, and have fun with it.

What is the takeaway? Honestly I have a lot but I’ll narrow it down. I want to be on a team that is high functioning but even higher in grace. This specific mistake happened because we are doing a lot right now.

Especially things that we aren’t experts in, like promoting a book. All of us, included the most gifted marketer I’ve ever met, are doing new things and quickly. Then, when mistakes happen we rally around each other, get in the trenches, and make the most of it.

I want a team that doesn’t make mountains out of mole hills and instead makes lemonade out of lemons. Maybe with a little vodka in it for times like these. Cheers .