Business policy exceptions and the 80% rule.

Not too long ago, I checked into a Hilton at 11:55 in the morning. My room was ready. Check-in didn’t start until noon, and if I wanted to check in five minutes early, it was going to cost me $25. 

So I sat in the lobby and waited it out. And because I have no survival instinct, I posted about it. This is a story about business policy exceptions, and why the rule I was mad at was not actually a bad rule.

Almost twelve thousand people showed up on social media to tell me I was the problem. One person called me a Karen. Someone else told me to go outside and touch grass. Countless strangers called me entitled and cursed at me. It was a long afternoon of trying to explain myself.

I’ll own my part. In the post, I called the policy “excessive,” and that one word put me in the seat of the person on trial. I aimed the whole thing at myself without meaning to. If I could write it again, I’d point at the rule instead of handing everyone a reason to point at me, because the RULE is what I had issues with, not the front desk agent etc. 

It was never about the five minutes. What bothered me was a rule that couldn’t bend for the situation in front of it. Because I actually LOVE rules. I just took the DISC assessment and this is confirmed, not to mention I’m a first-born, trauma surviving, female entreprenuer – I LOVE RULES! But in this situation, the room was clean and empty and nobody was waiting behind me, and the policy still said pay or wait.

Automate for the 80%

That policy isn’t stupid. When the hotel is sold out and every room is being turned over, it protects the housekeeping team and keeps things fair for the people in line. Most days, that’s the reality. I even teach this. Automate for the 80%.

But I wasn’t the 80% that afternoon. The lobby was quiet, my room was ready, and there was no line. The rule had no way to account for any of that. It treated a slow Tuesday like a sold-out Saturday, with little wiggle room for the 20%.

We do the same thing in our own businesses more than we’d like to admit. We build the rule for the hardest day and then run it on every day, and the person standing in front of us is the one who pays for it. Business policy exceptions aren’t a failure of the system. They’re the part nobody remembered to build.

The strange part from the comments in the post wasn’t the insults. It was that when I named the friction, almost nobody heard a critique of a policy. They heard a critique of me. In their eyes I wasn’t flagging a broken rule, I was just a difficult woman.

And I understand it, because I catch myself doing the same thing from the other side. When a client tells me some part of working with me frustrated them, my first reaction isn’t relief that now I know. It’s a flush of shame. I gave someone something that wasn’t good enough. The feedback stops being information and starts being a verdict on me.

Which is strange, because pointing at the broken thing is my actual job. I have been hired, more than once, to walk into a business and find every place where the system stops making sense. And even then, even when it’s the work I was paid to do, it doesn’t always sit well. It can feel like finger-pointing to the person on the receiving end. It isn’t. 

It’s the first line of a conversation that makes the whole thing better.

That’s the muscle I want us to build together, because I want us to succeed, and I don’t think we get there by defending every rule we’ve ever written. We get there by staying open enough to hear the person who tells us one of them stopped working.

Your clients can feel it when you’re not open to that. So they don’t tell you the onboarding confused them, or that the invoice caught them off guard. They just decide it isn’t worth the awkwardness, and they don’t come back, and you never find out why. The complaint you never heard was the one that could have saved the relationship.

What a complaint actually is

So here’s the reframe I had to give myself in that lobby (and the many hours of responding to comments afterwards). A complaint isn’t a dead end. It’s the start of a conversation. The person asking why it costs $25 when the room is ready isn’t being difficult. She’s doing the one piece of quality control nobody else in the building thought to do.

Build your systems for the 80%, absolutely. But write your business policy exceptions before you need them, and stay human enough to make the call when a real person is standing in front of you. A rule that runs on all 100% of situations was really built for none of them.

Flexibility was never the absence of a system. It’s the part of the system that still remembers there’s a person on the other side of it.

Not sure if your system is up to the test? Book a call with me here.