There is something that all of us have in common, although we may not admit it as often as we should. It’s the fact that we are imperfect and in our lifetime, we are going to make many mistakes. Some of those mistakes are going to be relatively small and easy to recover from but others are going to have an impact on you from that point and for the rest of your life. In the following fictional story, a man made one of the biggest mistakes that he could possibly make when he ended up costing the company where he worked $250,000. He thought for sure he was fire but the boss decided to teach them a different lesson.
My old boss, the CEO of a small hospital, told me a story from back when he was a lab technician (for simplicity, let’s call him Dan).
Dan had forgotten to check some sort of mechanism on a piece of equipment he used, it malfunctioned and broke the equipment which ended up having around a $250,000 repair bill.
The next day Dan’s boss called him in to talk about it, and he was sure he was going to be fired. His boss asked him why he didn’t do a proper check, made sure he understood what happened and sent him back to work.
Dan asked him “Am I not getting fired? I was almost sure that’s what this was about.”
His boss said “No way, I just spent $250,000 teaching you a lesson you’ll never forget. Why would I fire you now?”
It seems silly, but that attitude always resonated with me.
Don’t make professional decisions based on emotional responses. Always know what your goal is when dealing with someone, and what exact problem you are trying to solve.
Everyone makes mistakes, and yelling at them just makes them resent you and become defensive.
Being calm and understanding will make people look up to you.
