Be respectful. In this day and age, the day of the volatile CEO or leader that’s yelling and screaming and somebody makes a mistake, they’re chewing them out, I think that day is over with. If it isn’t, it should be.
If someone makes a mistake, my first reaction is not to get mad at them. It’s to say, ‘OK, you’ve made a mistake, and now how are we going to fix it?’
The second question would be, ‘What did we learn from this?’
I’ve had volatile people around here and I’ve sat down with them and had those discussions and said, ‘You can’t be doing that. You’re not going to engender respect nor are you going to get the best out of people if every time they slip up you start yelling at them.’ Who wants to work in that environment? I’ve never met anyone that wanted to make a mistake.
They made a mistake — it’s, ‘OK, you goofed up. How are we going to fix it, and how are you going to learn from it so it doesn’t happen again?’ I tell my employees all the time, ‘Look, I want to be constantly making new mistakes. But hopefully, I won’t make a whole lot of the same ones over and over again.’
Things happen. Sometimes people make big mistakes and little mistakes, but things happen. I tell people all the time to be a good leader. You’ve got to be able to deal with ambiguity. You can’t deal with ambiguity by just checking in because the truth is, nothing is certain. Nothing is going to turn out like you thought.
I tell my students this all the time, ‘Whatever you think is going to happen, probably isn’t.’ It’s more likely that it’s probably going to be better than you thought it was going to be or worse than you thought it was going to be. But very unlikely is it going to turn out like you thought. You’ve got to be able to deal with that ambiguity of how things are going to turn out. When mistakes happen, you try to fix them, whether they are big or little.
How to reach: Murphree Venture Partners, (713) 655-8500 or www.murphreeventures.com
