What do you do when you make a mistake?

Many of us grew our careers through the engineering ranks. Engineering is more black and white than management. Either your code works or it does not. When an engineer becomes a manager that kind of thinking has to change. Everyday managers are faced with things that do not work like people leaving their teams, irate or lost customers, bugs in their products, etc.

Managers cannot afford to be paralyzed by setbacks. They need to obtain the mentality of a baseball player that loses a game one day and goes out with energy to win the next day. The most successful teams have winning percentages of 50% and the most successful ballplayers have hitting averages of around 30%. Managers have to learn how to sleep well after a failure and get up the next with energy and win.

Some of the aforementioned setbacks will be due to manager mistakes. These may be the hardest to overcome. I have personally done things like shorten development cycles or said the wrong thing at the wrong time resulting in missed schedules or unhappy peers and employees. The question you need to ask yourself is what do you when you make a mistake?

Here are some things that work for me:

• Get up the next day with energy
• Do not be embarrassed
• Take responsibility for your actions
• Acknowledge the mistake before you are told about it by others
• Look at the problems ensuing from the mistake as just things to be solved
• Put a plan together
• Work harder and longer to make up for your actions
• Work with your team to deal with the problem
• Be open minded
• Learn from your mistake

These are not easy things to do but they can make all of the difference in your success as a manager.

More later ...