Thursday, January 27, 2011

A mistake doesn’t mean you’re fired

As I was running around putting out fires this morning, the newest member of our team (she’s been here less than a month) called me over. There was a slightly panicked look in her eye when she confessed that she made a mistake. It took me a few minutes to wrap my head around the mistake, then I had to admit that I didn’t know the answer (or really, how to fix the problem since it involves several groups). I was able to help her backtrack as to how the mistake occurred so she could prevent it in the future and also clearly answer any questions when grilled by our manager. As it turns out, he took it calmly also (although he was slightly less calm when discussing it with me later).

The employee was surprised at how well we took it. I confessed that this morning was hectic with two video conferences back to back (and not enough time to prep) and that if she had told us any other time, our reactions might have been different. But the reality is getting mad wouldn’t solve anything and the best thing to do would be to figure out a solution. Hopefully, I’ll be this calm tomorrow when I hear back from the other parties that this affects.

1 comment:

Rich said...

Not fun. I recall a meeting with the manager over a certain LARGE project over various mistakes in the documentation...Ugh, it's a horrible feeling.