There may be some blissful states in which you never have to say you're sorry, but not in business. Every now and then you do have to say you're sorry, at least to yourself, because you truly regret something you've done. You regret it because it was a mistake.
The first time you fail, there may be a painful shock. You certainly will have failed many times before your first job. But now, with a new set of judges, with your ambitions clarified, with your hopes crystallizing, your first on-the-job failure can take on soul-shattering proportions. You realize that you're mortal and vulnerable. And the shock of knowing that you are responsible-that a great deal of money or time (not to mention prestige) will be lost as a result-will compound your feeling of remorse.
"When the hum of the machine stopped, I was out of the chair in nothing flat," says Roger Ames. "Today of all days! We had to get the volume out, had to make the run. But when I walked up to Hesburg, the foreman, I kept my cool. If Hesburg had screwed up, I was going to stay calm. After all, he had been around a long time, and nobody's perfect.
"So I asked him nicely what was the matter. He just shrugged. 'Burned out,' he said. 'Shot.'
" 'How long to fix it?'
" 'Well, you got to get a complete new collar and bearing assembly, and I don't know, they're looking at it now, but I bet the regulator is at least damaged. I'd say, even if they have them right in stock and get right out here, two, three days.'
" 'What? You mean we can't get this run finished today?'
" 'Oh, no way we can do it today. No way in the world. Can't you smell that smell? That machine is burned out but good, man.' "
Roger blew his cool at this point: "Well, what the hell happened, Dave? This thing was just overhauled."
"When it's twenty-five hundred rpm for more than ten minutes, you got to expect that something will go wrong. Won't always-it's good gear. But that's way beyond the specs."
"Well, who was on it, Vitali? What was he doing running it at that rate?"
"Following orders."
"Whose orders? My God, Dave, why did you tell him to-"
"I didn't tell him. You did."
Roger just stared. Hesburg, with what seemed to be immense satisfaction, produced a clipboard. The piece of paper on top bore Roger's signature. The words blurred before his eyes. There was a lot of language about the high priority on this run; but there was, undeniably, an authorization to exceed maximum capacity on the machine. And now Roger remembered the talk he had had with the operator when Hesburg was not around.
"My first feeling was, I wished the earth would open up and swallow me. How could I have done such a dumb thing?"
It didn't take long for Roger to start worrying about his job. "Would they fire me? No, they wouldn't fire me. I could see the boss's face in my imagination, looking at me more in pity than in anger. They wouldn't fire me, but this sure as hell would not send my stock zooming up.
"And it was then that I got mad. Mad as hell. I was mad at the operator. How could he have been such an idiot? He's supposed to know the performance characteristics of that equipment. They pay him enough. And the hell of it was, with the damned union, you couldn't touch him.
"But then I really got mad at Hesburg. Standing there smirking at me! He was enjoying this. He liked seeing me fall on my face. He must have known what was going on, and he could have saved the situation.
"But what could I do? Yell? Get into a shouting match with Hesburg? He'd love that. So all I did was say, 'Get it fixed as quickly as you can,' and walk away. At my desk I started to think about the people I'd have to notify. The boss. The sales manager-God, he would go through the roof! And the customer would have to be notified. Would I have to do that?"
All crises are people crises. Even when their origins are mechanical, the human dimension rapidly takes over. The job of handling the immediate problem has more to do with understanding yourself and other people than with being able to trace wire A to terminal B where it forks off on its way to resistor C.
Roger's reactions were about par for the course. The first time you really fail, you feel ashamed. At the same time, you are angry. But there is something that tries to deflect the anger. So you don't get mad at yourself first; you try to find other people to get mad at.
Now, of course the techniques of crisis management call for objectivity. You're not supposed to be emotional at all.
You're not supposed to look for scapegoats. Instead, you are supposed to say, O.K., it happened, too bad, my fault; now let's put our heads together and work out Plan B.
It doesn't usually happen that way. The person who has just made the initial major mistake is shaken by a number of things. The fundamental question underlying many other questions is, What is this going to do to my career? How badly have I damaged my chances for promotion? Am I finished here?
Along with the career doubts may come even more disturbing resonances: Do I really have what it takes? Or am I in over my head?
These are basic questions. But we don't see them right away, because of the anger. That anger is exacerbated when, as is often the case, we realize that there are people who might have helped, but who enjoy seeing us in a bad spot.
It's like falling partway down a steep slope. If you don't handle yourself just right, if you don't manage your delicately balanced position just so, you will fall further. You have only one priority. You have to creep back up to the top, going slowly and carefully. Only when you have gotten back to safety can you enjoy the luxuries of anger and scapegoating.
The first relevant question in a crisis is, How bad is it? A rapid review of the consequences of the mistake should lead to a grasp of the dimensions of the problem. The shipment is going to be delayed; maybe delayed as much as a week. It was promised for tomorrow. Everybody has been assuming that failure to meet the deadline would be catastrophic.
But sometimes such situations are overstated. Maybe there is leeway. Maybe the customer has built in some "give" without telling you.
Of course there may be yelling, screaming, weeping, and gnashing of teeth. You're going to have to take some flak. But keep pushing for a solution, however makeshift, that causes the least amount of harm.
That's not always easy. A person caught in such a bind says, "No way. Do you think I'm crazy? The thing I'm going to do first and foremost is cover myself."
Not possible. You're already exposed. You can't avoid damage to your reputation when you commit a major blunder. But you can minimize and contain it by going into a full-scale damage-control operation. And sometimes you can even enhance your image through the vigor and effectiveness with which you attack the problem. There are major figures in business who have solidified their positions at the pinnacle by this very means. They are very good at handling an emergency. That the emergency may have been caused by their own errors becomes inconsequential.
Victor Hugo wrote, "Be it true or false, what is said about men often has as much influence on their lives, and especially on their destinies, as what they do."
The crisis of the first serious mistake can stretch over decades, because of what it might do to your reputation. The mistake is not the crisis; it's the reverberation and its effect on the career.
Here's an example:
They were sitting around at the agency wondering who could be assigned to the big account. Somebody asked, "What about Larry Holtz?"
"Oh, my God, you can't put Larry on a sensitive account like that. He's a bull in a china shop. He and those people in Cincinnati would be at each other's throat in a month."
A bull in a china shop. This was what everybody said about Holtz. He was tactless, blustering; he might have the right answers, but he would always be sure to alienate the client. Better keep him in a low-visibility job.
Holtz had been suggested by a senior executive who was new to the firm and he was interested in the reaction of his colleagues-interested enough to look into it. Why did Larry have this reputation? Nobody knew; but everybody was sure it was justified. It took a lot of digging to discover that, yes, years ago Holtz had blown up in the middle of a client meeting and stalked out. There had been provocation-the client had been exceptionally disagreeable and stupid-but nevertheless, Larry had committed a cardinal sin.
That one mistake had dogged Larry Holtz for years. To those on the inside, Holtz had never changed. He was still a ticking bomb.
But to the new senior executive, this legend did not conform to reality at all. If anything, Holtz was far too timid about asserting himself with clients. A long conversation with the long-ago culprit elicited the information that Holtz was deliberately holding himself back, consciously stifling first-rate ideas, in an effort to mend his image. He assumed that image counted for a great deal in the company; and obviously he was not mistaken.
So he was paying for one mistake in two ways: Others exaggerated it; and he was trying to minimize by attempting to become something he was not.
This is an example of how the first big mistake can hurt the most. You can skew a whole career in trying to avoid a recurrence. A Persian proverb goes: "He who has been bitten by a snake fears a piece of string." Mistakes are all part of experience-but you can learn the wrong lessons from them.
In the Learning Decade, you are finding yourself, exploring your limits. When you reach the boundary line of your present limits and go beyond, you are apt to get into trouble. Some people take that experience to mean that they should never go near the boundary again. Most rational and perceptive people would accept the notion that if you don't go near it, you will never expand it. However, in the heat (or embarrassment or fear) of failure, this is a difficult dictum to follow.
What the senior executive told Holtz was that the only way he could wipe out the stigma would be by being himself and confronting clients with such persuasive and irrefutable logic that a new reputation would be made, superseding the old.
First failure can be one of the most crucial and determining episodes of your twenties. By responding coolly and logically when it happens-and, much more important, the next time the possibility of failure looms up at you-you can avoid the responses of retrenchment and fear that could well hamstring you for the future.
Simply witnessing examples of how early mistakes have dogged other people is enough to make some people cautious, gun-shy. Whether you're reacting to your own failure or that of another person, don't duck tough decisions and bold moves because you don't want to take the chance of having a bad rep hung on you for the rest of your career. It stultifies creativity. Worse, it sucks the joy out of work. Luckily, it is one of those crises over which you have some control. Nobody can avoid mistakes. But you can avoid the temptation to play it safe because you might make a mistake. That's a self-induced crisis. That's slow suicide.
