Archive for January, 2011

Go ahead, make a mistake

Friday, January 21st, 2011

Thomas Edison acknowledged that he didn’t know anything about making light bulbs and that is took him close to 3,000 experiments before he hit upon a carbonized cotton filament that would burn for more than a few minutes. As for poor results, Edison decided to take the high road and was quoted as saying ”Results! Why man, I have gotten a lot of results. I know several thousand things that won’t work.”

Mistakes are tough for us to take. We view them as a sign of failure. But the reality is that we rarely get things right the first time and that it is only by acknowledging and learning from our mistakes that we improve our performance and success.

I recently got a phone call from a client who seemed frantic on the phone. He told me that he had made a major screwup by not “appropriately responding to a call from his company’s regional president”. The day the call came in, he told me, he was working on a proposal that he had recently received and that had to be out later that week. When his regional president asked him to prepare some documents for his review, he explained to him that he was working on this proposal and asked if he could get to it later in the week. The RP told him okay but a few minutes later his boss came in chastising him about putting the RP’s work on the back burner.

We talked about what he could do to manage the situation while acknowledging that while he was on target in terms of what needed to get done, he probably did not handle it in the best way possible. In about 5 minutes we came up with a quick solution:

  • He tagged another member of his team to begin working on the Regional President’s request. He knew that she would not have all the relevant information but could begin the research and that he would be able to backfill her with information that would allow her to get at least 75% of the report completed. He could finish up from there.
  • He would send off an email to the RP immediately letting him know that he had put a plan in place and would provide him with a time frame for completion that would fit his requirement. He would also cc his boss to let him know what he had done.
  • He would follow-up with the RP a day or two after the report was completed and sent off and would (depending on how the call went) apologize for the screw-up explaining that he was really focused on the proposal and he let that work get the better of him.

We reconnected a few weeks later and he told me that all was good. His proposal response got off in time and he was named a finalist. His Regional President appreciated his quick response and his apology. In fact his RP even went so far as to apologize back to him for making the request since the RP knew he was working on that important proposal.

So what’s a game plan for making mistakes…

  1. Embrace your mistake and don’t run away from it. Don’t become defensive but instead recognize that it happens to all of us all the time.
  2. Acknowledge it to someone who can either help you think it through or even to the person you’ve offended. We live in a very forgiving culture and for the most part, people will see your truthfulness as a sign of strength
  3. Rely on your support network to help you get the issue resolved. That may be your boss, team members or a friend. Others can bring a new perspective to the table.
  4. Change how you are doing things. If you see a pattern where you are making a similar mistake whether its with a colleague or your kids, see what you need to do to make it better
  5. Get back out there. Making a mistake can make you a bit gun-shy. Your risk level, idea sharing and courage may suffer a bit since you want, above all, not to screw up again. The only way you’ll find out is to get back on the horse and try again.

Making mistakes is a part of life. In fact, the more you make, the smarter you get, so go ahead and screw up!

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How Reliable Are You?

Wednesday, January 12th, 2011

During the days of land line only phones, Ma Bell has a dial tone reliability of 99.999% which meant that all but 5.26 minutes per year you could pick up your phone and be assured that you would have a dial tone.

In his New York Times Technology column,Randall Stross details how reliable technology services can be by pointing out that while they all strive for five-“9s” (like Ma Bell) with the current exception of Google search (which has multiple redundancy and does achieve five-9s )most achieve four-9’s, which means reliability of all but 52 minutes/year, which is pretty good.

Of course, tech companies have multiple back-ups,mirrored sites, and using other computing systems to provide discrete services such as storage back-up. Perhaps most interesting is how Netflix relies on what they call a “Rambo Architecture” that forces part of their system to modify in case there is a failure in another part. For example, if there a failure in the part of their system that provides customized recommendations for viewers,rather than shutting down that whole program, the Netflix system will just show popular titles rather than personalized titles. Netflix even goes so far as to stress their system themselves to see how their disruption protocols operate.

Well, so what does that have to do with us a leaders.

Clearly, we are not going to have an “up time reliability” of anywhere near 99.999%, even if we wanted to achieve that kind of standard But how reliable are you and what makes the difference in your being reliable?

Whether it is your starting and finishing meetings on time, your ability to make good decisions, lead a problem solving process, solicit staff input or make good budget decisions, we all find that we do this better some times and not as well other times. I suspect that for the most part our “reliability percentage” for even great leadership is probably, on average, in the mid 80s. In fact, at an 85% reliability and based on 2080 hours in a work year, being 85% reliable means that you are “on your game” for 1768 hours or 34 hours per week. If you squander 6 hrs per week (in a 40 hour work week—who works that) your “reliability would be less than 85%. And as we all know, there are some days and weeks we do really well and some days and weeks when we’re a bit off.

But more importantly, how can we improve our reliability percentage.

Here’s some ideas…

  • Debrief yourself at the end of your day and ask what you did well and what missed the mark. Don’t dwell on this missed opportunities but note and pay attention to them; What worked well and why? What did we do differently today from yesterday?
  • Like Netflix, stress your system to see how you can improve by. Take on an additional project or try a new approach to leading a staff meeting to see how well it works and how well you work. More tools and techniques to get done what has to get done will help you become more efficient and provide more up time reliability.
  • Practice healthy behaviors like getting enough sleep, taking breaks and eating lunch with colleagues rather than at your desk.
  • Amazingly enough, technology companies turn to their competitors for specialized services such as Amazon Web Services that make over 20 specialized web services available to other companies. Look to others within your organization to provide you with specialized support that you either don’t have the expertise or are not interested in providing. Collaboration is a beautiful thing.

We’re just the people who build the darn machines but we’ll never get close to five 9s reliability. Take it with a grain of salt and look for small ways that you can become more reliable to yourself and your organization. Unlike the machines, we’re all about success not perfection.

© Richard Citrin, All Rights Reserved, 2011

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Be it resolved..

Monday, January 3rd, 2011

How are those resolutions going so far?

I’ve never been a big fan of resolutions since I think they merely help set us up to fail. After all many of them may be made on New Year’s eve and its just not fair to hold ourselves to commitments we might have made while in inebriated or with people who may actually hold us accountable for our actions.

A recent study I saw compared the difference between people who had set goals for themselves and told someone else and a group of folks who set goals for themselves and did not tell anyone. Now, conventional wisdom would tell us that by telling someone that we are committed to a goal, we should have the kind of motivation that would help us through the task. But the researchers found that those people who did not tell anyone about their goal were better able to make incremental steps to achieving the goal than those people who had told others.

The researchers suspected that the reason for the failure to follow-through was related to the idea that by telling others that you were going for this goal, we created a sense of accomplishment in and of itself and that when it came to next steps to take in the task, the participants felt like they had already achieved something and lost interest in following up on the actual task. The “no-tellers” didn’t have that sense of accomplishment and therefore proceeded to dig into the task at hand immediatley making progress on their goal.

Last year on January 1,2010 I decided to begin writing a blog about the Allegheny River. I live on the River and walk my dog Clancy every  morning and night. I thought it would be cool to record the life of the River (as I saw it) and to use it as a kind personal spiritual discipline. I distinctly remember deciding to not tell anyone about it for the first month, mostly I thought, to avoid embarrassing my self in case I did not continue it. On Februray 1, I began to let others know about it and kept it up all year long.

There is a rule of thumb that by spending 15 minutes on a new behavior over a 21 day period, anyone can change a behavior into something that is more effective and positive. Don’t bother telling anyone but just focus on the change you want for 2011 and just stay with it for the time being and then see who you want to tell. Who knows they may even notice it first?

Oh and by the way, if it doesn’t work for you this month, the Chinese New Year, the year of the Rabbit, begin on February 3rd.

Have an amazing 2011.

© Richard Citrin, All Rights Reserved, 2011

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