IN a former organization, my team rolled out a new learning platform which became so successful that several clients wanted to have their own version.
Our prototype evolved and with it came complications and challenges we did not foresee. In time, with our limited resources and increasing pressures brought on by client demands, we had to put a stop to the project. What started out as a good idea became a pain point for the team. After several meetings with our executives, we realized we should have stopped with the initial project.
There are many reasons why we make bad decisions. Mine was the mistaken belief that new service offerings would help make my team continue to be relevant to the organization. By offering new services, I thought I was protecting my team’s place in the organization. In reality, however, my team was already doing well with the projects we were handling. Sometimes, bad decisions stem from our own biases and assumptions about others, and so we act on unsubstantiated information. Or, if we are given information, it is not enough, or we only listen to those that we want to hear. Most of the time, we make bad decisions because we insist on what we want.
Whatever your reason for making a bad decision, you are likely acting out of a limited set of information, perspective, or assumption. In my case, we started out the project thinking that we were only servicing one client. We did not know that it was going to be that successful that other clients would also request the same. In a sense, we were biting off more than we could chew and since we wanted to impress the other clients, we acquiesced. The customization requests increased, and my team could not keep up with the increasing demands.
The first thing I did was to admit to my team that I messed up and I took responsibility for my actions by talking to our clients about what we realistically could do for them. Some of them got angry and one client even threatened to speak to my manager about how unprofessional I was. Fortunately, I had already talked to my manager, and she was the one who taught me how to appease the clients. I had to protect my team because I was ultimately the one to blame for the project. I met with my team, and we decided on what we could deliver per client, and then we drafted new timelines. Some of the clients appreciated what we offered, while some took to blaming me and getting angry. As in any decision, good or bad, you just have to take the good with the bad.
You also need to act quickly and decisively to avoid sinking any deeper into the mistake. Avoid the sunk cost fallacy where you continue to persist in a course of action simply because you have invested significant time and cost already. Cut your losses and save as much as you can from the situation. I had to sit down with my team and evaluate what we could realistically deliver to our clients and be upfront on what we could deliver. This also helped them manage their expectations and gave us enough time to deliver what was reasonable.
Part of the planning should include identifying the risks in the bad decisions and finding ways to mitigate them. One of the risks we identified was some of the client’s loss of confidence in what my team could do. My team and I realized that we had to rebuild that confidence by delivering as scheduled, and to avoid overpromising by thoroughly understanding their requirements so we could provide realistic timelines. The incident helped us craft a project scoping document for requests that were beyond what we normally do for clients. The document helped us improve our processes and avoid overcommitting to new requests.
As part of mitigating the effects of the bad decision, we identified action plans to work our way toward a solution. One of the things people forget when they make a bad decision is to mitigate the adverse effects of their decision. Some people just ignore what they did and move on. If you really want to repair the lost trust, you have to do reparations to rebuild it. One way we did that for a client was to provide help in developing a training program they had been working on for a year. They appreciated the olive branch we extended, and it helped us develop better working relationships. If you truly want to avoid making the same mistake, identify the lesson that can be learned from the experience. Some leaders commit the same mistake over and over again because they have not taken the time to reflect and internalize the lessons that they should have learned. As Paulo Coelho, a renowned author, once wrote, “A mistake repeated more than once is a decision.” If you really want to improve and develop your leadership skills, you need to be deliberate in your actions, and your team needs to understand the purpose of your actions and decisions.
If you can, share the experience so that others can learn from it. Remember that bad decisions can come from incomplete information or erroneous data. Nobody is perfect but anybody can learn from other people’s mistakes. When I shared this experience with another manager, he was grateful because he was about to commit the same mistake. Apparently, he had a client who was insisting on a project, but he knew that his team could not take on any more projects. I advised him to report it to our manager who was the one who negotiated on his behalf. When lessons are shared, mistakes can be minimized.
As a people manager, you are bound to make bad decisions. But it is what you do after the bad decision that defines your kind of leadership. Are you the kind of leader who passes the responsibility to others, one who blames someone else, or one who takes the responsibility and learns from it? What you do will determine the kind of leaders you are grooming for the next generation, and will determine the kind of legacy you leave behind.
Image credits: Toa Heftiba on Unsplash