Everyone Makes Mistakes

It is important to recognize everyone makes mistakes. If you try to make your leadership experience one that is “perfect” and without “error” you will fail. Since making mistakes is a natural occurrence then we have to properly and quickly address mistakes so the damage of the mistake doesn’t follow us around like a bad reputation.

The Harvard Business Review blog featured a great article What the Heck is Wrong with My Leadership a few years ago. This article is about a leader who’s leadership rating fell from a top-performing status to a level that almost required him to be fired. His work to fix his reputation involved quickly admitting he made a mistake and then putting in place a mechanism for people to interact with him on all types of issues. One of the most important things he did was to start a blog where he posted transparent content on all of things he was working on.

“I also started actively, some would say overactively, using digital videos, webcasts, and an internal blog to make sure everybody around the world knew what I was doing, and to get feedback. My blog was called Bulldozer’s Blog. I had a policy of posting everything that I had that was related to the business on it, as soon as I had it. Not pending contracts or other things that had to remain secret, but when I was working on draft presentation I was putting it in the blog.”

When he left the company his blog was getting over 5000 internal hits a week with people in the organization actively downloading content. His leadership rating was back at the top.

The Bottom Line