Page 191 - Roy W. Rice - CEO Material How to Be a Leader in Any Organization-McGraw-Hill (2009)

172 • CEO Material: How to Be a Leader in Any Organization

Employees who mess up are ultimately better employees because they
had a second chance . . . like getting a dog from the pound.
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Early on in your career, mistakes feel like a big deal. They are seldom
a big deal. The quarterback doesn’t sit on the bench after a bad throw,
does he? No, he gets out and runs another pass. Instead of thinking
you need a machine to kick your own butt, go throw a touchdown.

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Almost all mistakes are forgivable.
You’ll learn more from one bad decision than all the good ones
you’ll ever make. One study found that you master the same from two
mistakes that you acquire from 20 successes. Now, this shouldn’t be your
primary method of acquiring knowledge, of course.
Confident people see slip-ups as a badge of honor and admit
mistakes right away. And they prefer to be around others who’ve survived
misfortunes of their own.
Almost all mistakes are forgivable—well, except things like the Exxon
Valdez. Hopefully, yours are never at that level. There are degrees of mis-
takes. I’m writing about the everyday type we all make, not malfeasance.

If you are in a boat you can’t plug, then you better seek counsel for
your decision. Know when to bring the superior officer in. Don’t sink
the boat.
I’m not taking lightly mistakes that cause loss of life, limb, or prop-
erty or demonstrate that you aren’t doing your job. Those are major issues
and errors that have to be avoided and should be feared. You and
I don’t deal with those daily, though. Our slip-ups are typos, lapses of
memory, presentation stumbles, missed deadlines, misrepresentations,
misinterpretations, and so forth. Few slips-ups have results like comedian
Phyllis Diller’s comment: “What I don’t like about the office Christmas
party is looking for a job the next day.”
Truth be told, a very visible, very public, very costly mistake is not
acceptable. Sometimes you do get fired.