Tuesday, February 13, 2007
Mistakes
Oscar Wilde once said that experience is the name we give our mistakes. People have sometimes asked me how I have achieved what I have done at what seems to them an early age. My reply is usually that I have made mistakes faster than my peers. I’m only half-joking.
Everyone makes mistakes, ranging from trivial misstatements to serious misjudgments. It is no less true for being a cliché: the more you try, the more you will fail. As is true with individuals, the companies that have cultivated a willingness to take risks have done better than those that have preferred to remain static. Apple Computer, for example, has had failures such as the Lisa and the Newton, as spectacular as its successes with products that create markets such as the iPod and iTunes.
Of course, I recognize that as professionals who are entrusted to represent other individuals, or even to take leadership roles, we should strive to make as we few mistakes as humanly possible. However, I believe that making fewer mistakes requires treating each mistake as an opportunity to learn. My goal is to be confident enough in general to be contrite when necessary.
As a manager, I try to remind myself that it is best to assess blame primarily for the purpose of promoting improvement. To me, the difference between the best employees and the average employees is that the former are more reliable. Ironically, they are more reliable because their positive attitude about mistakes has earned them my trust even as it has fostered their own professional development.
In teaching the ethics course for law students, I have been struck by how many cases that ruin an attorney’s career begin with a mistake which if acknowledged could have been remedied early enough to have been an embarrassment and not much more. Yet the individual involved, perhaps through delay or pride, or, worse, because of denial or a cover-up, aggravates the original problem and turns it into a disaster.
Thus, a person’s attitude after making a mistake may be more important than his attitude before making it.
