Rules Of Management

RULE 46 - Learn from your mistakes

“A career setback can be like a romance gone bad. If you don’t learn from your mistakes, you’re doomed to repeat them, most likely in your next job. Many professionals are so eager to flee a bad job or fearful of being jobless, they jump from one job mismatch to the next, just like some people so in their personal relationships. If you’ve been knocked down but haven’t looked at what caused your stumble, you’re setting yourself up to fall again.”

Bradley G. Richardson, ‘To Move Ahead Again,
Learn From Career Setbacks’

We all make mistakes – we wouldn’t be the wonderfully creative, innovative managers we are if we didn’t. But some managers gloss over many mistakes they make. They cover them, bury them, forgot about them. You, a brilliant manager, won’t do that. You won’t beat yourself up over them, nor sit in a pit of misery over them but you will analyze what went wrong, discuss with colleagues why it went wrong and make a plan to prevent it from going wrong again.

Our mistakes could be anything from a badly handled appraisal, a lost sale, a badly thought out report, a poor use of time or resources, a failure to meet a deadline – when you start to write down how many failures there could be the list is endless.

Once you have made your mistake the important thing to do as well as all the above is to find out the right way to do it next time. Being a manager is an ongoing learning experience. You never stand still and you never think you know it all – you don’t and can’t but you can have trusted people to ask and good reference books to hand to guide you – especially if they are short, sharp, snappy, and practical.*

Mistakes are brilliant because they not only teach us where we went wrong but also how to fit it. You are better manager, more experienced, have a wider spectrum to call on when you’ve made a few errors. We all make mistakes – admit them, learn from them and move on.

“Being a manager is an ongoing learning experience.”

* See, for example, Ros Jay, Fast Thinking Manager’s Manual, Prentice Hall, 2001

posted by Right Ranger @ 8:19 PM