A Take on Mistakes

From an early age we are conditioned to think that making mistakes is a bad thing. From getting a poor score on a math test, delivering a newspaper to the wrong house on the wrong day of the week or giving a customer a cheeseburger vs a hamburger in their order, I made a ton of mistakes during my formative years.

Each of those situations had a steady dose of feedback in the moment but in the grand scheme of things were not of any material consequence. In business, making mistakes can have very direct and lasting consequences.

As I look at my own career and think of the mistakes I’ve made and / or seen along the way, here are some thoughts on how to address them and recover from them:

Own Up to Them: step one when you’ve made a mistake is to own up to it. Sweeping them under the rug or trying to talk your way out of it may provide a temporary solution or delay the pain associated with it, but sooner or later the truth always comes out. I’ve had the luxury of making lots of mistakes over my career. In my dispatching days, we would regularly have to take tank readings from customers and manually enter them into our system. If you slipped a digit you could incur the cost of a delivery made too soon to a storage tank or worse, have the customer run out of product if you entered a higher reading than they actually had. When those types of errors happened with me or my teammates, we learned to focus on resolution vs establishing blame. Own it, act on it.

Create Processes to Eliminate Them: When the issues you face in your business are repeated and become part of your ways of working, it’s time to make a change. In my retail days, we saw consistent merchant optimism around seasonal and modular sell through. In those days, the ‘mistakes’ made would relate to overly ambitious order quantities tied to modular and seasonal calendars. For years the solution to these challenges would be flex space or prolonged storage in the store. As we got tighter on our overall processes we came up with modular calendars and processes that tagged a best before date on a season or modular. For example, as the season ended, we would impose a percentage off on day 1 followed by subsequent reductions thereafter that brought product retail to a penny over time. By putting this process in place we forced accountability into the process and helped to ensure order quantities were not overly optimistic. Process driven accountability is a powerful lever you can pull to eliminate mistakes and improve overall productivity.

Learn From Your Mistakes: Throughout my career and in particular over the last decade in senior leadership, I have seen how small mistakes can turn into lasting challenges for the business. In some cases, those mistakes can be small in nature - like setting pricing for a customer or segment that once implemented can be very difficult to adjust or improve upon. Sometimes the information used to make those decisions is inadequate or incomplete. In my experience the best way to minimize the impact of those issues is to do your due diligence, ask lots of questions and model your expectations. For example, if you are signing a new large account or working on a large project, what are the pessimistic, expected and aspirational assumptions? What similar accounts or projects have you worked on in the past and how can they be leveraged to help you in the current scenario? As I often say, history is a good teacher. By leveraging your past mistakes and experience you can set yourself up for a more successful outcome in your current endeavors.

To make mistakes is to be human. If we look at them not as gotcha moments but rather opportunities to grow as professionals and organizations, we can improve outcomes for our companies and our careers. That is not to say that it is OK to make a career out of making mistakes. Some mistakes can cost you your job or worse, your credibility in the market. You can’t get it right all the time, but when you do make a mistake, make sure you own it, set processes to avoid it in the future and most importantly - learn from it.

Until next time, keep the faith!

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Jim McKay is a seasoned supply chain executive with over twenty-five years experience in leading and coaching others. From the shop floor to the board room to the ball diamond and hockey rink, those who know him know that he has a few stories to share about life and leadership. Through his 'Reflections' posts and 'Reflections of a Workaholic' publications Jim shares his experience in transportation, supply chain and leadership through impactful and insightful stories that are meant to help and inspire others.

The commentary and opinions in these stories are his own...