Management, Mistakes and the Pursuit of Perfection

Management books, journals, magazines and podcasts. They are everywhere. And plenty of them are very useful and have great information about the art and science of management. But, it's rare that any of them talk about mistakes. Now, we are all human the last time I checked. (In the event I'm incorrect, I humbly welcome our benevolent alien overlords.) So, we make mistakes. Yes, even managers.

And in management, you can certainly make plenty of errors. Managers new and old can fail to act in the presence of poor behavior, allow bad patterns to develop and so on. Even worse, they can feel paralyzed by the results of their inaction. That can result in a manager who is in a miserable job. Patrick Lencioni ably writes about what happens to a company when employees are unhappy in a easy to read parable.

It's bad enough when a single or even a few employees are caught in that pickle, but an unhappy manager can make a lot of folks life unhappy. They have real or perceived power, the ability change things and they do control peoples' lives. It is a very bad combination when a manager is miserable.

But, there's almost no such thing as a mistake that cannot be undone in the world of business. That's not to say that it might not take a lot of work to right a few wrongs, but it can be done, one way or another. It does require strength of character and a dedication to the pursuit of perfection. If you don't have both, I'd argue that you might want to pursue another career path that doesn't include management.

One fellow I used to work for used to say that there were some "givens" in each job. These givens were immutable laws of politics in an organization. That might be a legacy worker, a certain vendor who was a relative of the owner or just a way of doing things. I agree with him to a point. There are givens at a particular point in time. But everything evolves and changes. In life and in business, we do not stay the same. So we must be alert to those times and opportunities in which we have a chance to make positive change, even if it means acknowledging our own mistake.