I Made a Mistake
I made a bad call yesterday and as a result a staff member got a harsh email from my boss. I replied and said it was all my fault: that I had made the call and that I had erred. I apologized and said it wouldn’t happen again. My boss immediately emailed me back and thanked me. While perhaps I’m just trying to make myself feel better, I do feel that in some ways it was a useful incident. My staff saw a real example of how to deal with a mistake, saw that I’ll take the heat, and saw that once you admit the mistake, apologize for it, and move on, it’s like the whole situation gets deflated, defused, downgraded. Now it feels as if it was no big deal. And, you know, it really wasn’t. At the time I made the call, I consider that I might be making a bad judgment, but then figured that, in this case, I’d risk begging for forgiveness rather than to delay and seek permission. Live and learn. Of course, watch me get fired tomorrow…
Kyle said:
Dec 11, 08 at 8:31 pmI’m not sure how I feel about your boss berating one of your staff. I’ve been managing up a great deal to get my boss to stop doing that. If I make the call (and my boss should always assume I did), then he can come down on me about it. I’ll decide who gets the next can of whoop ass opened on them. Reaching deep into the organization to yell at someone doesn’t really help anything.
Good on ya’ though for sucking the silver lining out of that cloud.
admin said:
Dec 12, 08 at 6:00 pmMy boss didn’t totally berate her, and to be fair, the issue was over an email my staff member sent. It was more like my boss replied to her email stating “This is wrong; what happened?” and cc’ed me. At which point I replied and said it was all my fault.
I think that when you’re a new CTO, your boss tends to step in a little more than you might want because s/he has had to do that in the past during the vacancy period. Plus s/he doesn’t know you yet. I agree, managing upward is KEY. And doing so subtly.