Garner Technology

I like to believe that people hire consultants like me to avoid making mistakes that they might otherwise make without the expertise that I can bring to the table.  I have a confession though . . . even now I can still make mistakes.  This might sound a bit silly as we all make mistakes but I often feel that as a consultant I am held to a hire higher standard.  As a result, I am often hard on myself when I do make a mistake.  This got me thinking about how, as a professional, we handle mistakes particularly in an industry such as IT where a mistake can have ramifications not only on the bottom-line but affect the daily lives of many people.

Consider first the nature of managing an IT infrastructure.  Managing IT is often like managing an orchestra with its myriad of complex components that all must work together to provide an always-available service to our customers.  It amazes me that it all works as well as it does when you consider the many failure points that can bring everything crashing down!

When a mistake is made there is a huge over-arching temptation to blame one of the components (software, hardware, consultant, other team members, etc.) as the culprit.  I see this all the time.  A system is no longer performing up to expectation and the fingers start pointing everywhere except at the one doing the pointing.

I try to admit quickly to my mistakes but the key, of course, is recognizing that you have made one in the first place.  It is important to understand what role you have played in a mistake since rarely is a mistake the responsibility of only one person.   Here is the process I go through when a mistake is made:

1.  Understand the scope of the mistake; identify all the players involved and their role

2.  What was my role in the mistake?  Even in mistakes that appear clearly someone else’s fault, if they are part of my team then I had a role to play somewhere.  It works the other way too; if I blame myself, who else had a role?

3.   Admit readily to your role and where things went wrong.  Understand what you would do differently

4.  Learn from the experience and move on

By understanding your role in mistakes and admitting to them you take a non-defensive posture and will be less likely to destroy your own credibility and that of your team.  In the end you will be open to learning from your experience, less likely to make the same mistake again and ready to learn from a whole bunch of new mistakes in the future!