HANDS ON MANAGEMENT

know which decisions are life changing until many years after you made them. I suspect if we knew, we would all take a lot more care in making them. All decisions have to be viewed over time, after the event. The amount of time you have to wait to evaluate the decision really depends on the kind of decision you made. In the case of my career choice, I could only declare victory some 20 years after I made the decision. If you made a decision to hire someone, you should be able to make an assessment if it was a good decision within three to four months of hiring the person. Other decisions, like whether to kick the ball at the net or pass it can be evaluated seconds after the decision has been made. Dealing with mistakes So when you realise that you have made a mistake, what should you do? The worst thing is to do nothing. Everyone makes mistakes but if you dont do something about it, you are making an even bigger mistake. My formula is three fold. First, acknowledge to yourself that you made the wrong decision. This is probably the most difficult thing to do, but very necessary. Secondly, apologise to someone for making the mistake. It depends on what the decision was. And thirdly, make another decision about how to correct any damage done by the initial decision. When I was looking after a section of the company in another country, I was approached by one of my subordinates who had someone who wanted to buy a piece of property we owned. I had the property appraised and this persons offer was just a little higher than the averaged appraisal values. Since real estate was part of my portfolio, I went ahead and sold it. A week later, I got a call from our finance director saying someone in my group had agreed to sell this property and the authority to do that was not within our group but rested with finance. Now I could have passed the buck and said it was my subordinate but that would not only have been wrong, but could also have landed

HANDS ON MANAGEMENT
my subordinate in trouble. Instead, I fessed up that I was the one that made the decision and took 100 per cent responsibility. I explained that I did not know that I didnt have the authority but the old adage of ignorance of the rules is no excuse was clearly true. After a couple of weeks, my boss called me into his office. I was very solemn and was prepared to be reprimanded at the least and maybe even fired. He told me that I made a bad decision and went on to say that the Management Group had discussed me and they all agreed that since I simply owned up to the mistake immediately, they did not think it was such a big deal. I left the office thoroughly relieved but more importantly, my faith in integrity was even stronger. When you are almost always accepts all of the blame whether or not he had any real input or association with the decision. I also made an almost fatal decision when I promoted a young lady to take over our industrial sales business. She had, I thought, performed very well when she looked after the merchandising section of our business. She understood our business very well and had great interpersonal skills. She started the job very well, going to visit all our large industrial customers and finding out what their needs were. She also had a gathering of her sales group and laid out very articulately the objectives and plans she had for her group. So initially, I was very pleased. But a couple of months later, as we reviewed the financial performance, I noticed that her division had fallen behind the others in revenue. So at our next management meeting, I probed on why we had a problem. From the data, it seemed we had not moved up any of our prices and with rising costs, our margins had shrunk. I asked her what she planned to do and of course, she responded that she would raise prices. At our review in my office, it became quite clear that we had not moved up any prices. Her logic was that she was afraid that increasing prices might result in losing customers. I told her that at the rate she was going, we might keep customers but have to close down the division as it was soon going to start losing money. Unfortunately, nothing changed and after some more investigation and dialogue, it was clear that this lady was a procrastinator. She just couldnt make a decision. But what about her previous role in merchandising? Some more investigations found out that her second in command was actually making the tough decisions. I moved her back to merchandising. I had to do something to correct the on-going damage. No one likes making mistakes but when you make decisions, you will always make mistakes. Email: Paterson@africaonline.co.ke

Mistakes we all MAKE THEM

By: BOB PATERSON

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MANAGEMENT

e all make mistakes or errors. We choose the strategy. We pick the wrong person to do the job. Making mistakes is something that is very human. Just look at some of the great sports figures in history. Babe Ruth is one of the greatest hitters in baseball yet his lifetime average was only 342. That means for every 1,000 times he came up to bat, he only made it successfully on base 342 times. I sure hope that if I calculated the number of mistakes I made, my batting average would be a lot better than 342.

But some mistakes are much more costly than others. When I think of the choice I made on the job and company I joined when I left university, it was one of the best. But at the time, I had no idea that it was. It is only in hindsight that I can make an evaluation of whether it was a good decision or not. Some decisions, like my choice to join a large multi-national company out of university, set me on a path that I would not have imagined. At that time, I was a computer programmer and thought that is what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. It turns out that I left the IT field three years after starting work and worked in five different countries around the globe. I

ended up being a managing director at one of the multi-national affiliates, all with the same company. I sure did not think it would be a life changing experience. In fact, there are three key decisions we make in our lives that have profound impact on how we live. For many, it will be what company they join, who they marry and where they decide to live. For others, it might be the kind of course they decide to take in university or maybe even the decision on whether to join a university or not, what kind of business to start and whether to have a family or not. I am sure if you think about it, you will probably come up with at least three of the decisions you made (or are about to make) that will define your future. The problem, of course, is you really dont

NO ONE LIKES MAKING MISTAKES BUT WHEN YOU MAKE DECISIONS, YOU WILL ALWAYS MAKE MISTAKES.
cornered by a bad decision or mistake, it is always easy to blame someone or something else. The problem is the truth will eventually be revealed. Then rather than just being responsible for a mistake, you will be responsible for lying or at least misdirecting the blame to someone or something else. The later issue would be much more important to most companies than the former. Blame everyone and everything but me has become almost an art by politicians. The only politicians I have ever heard take full responsibility are the ones in Japan. But in Japan, the culture is such that the most senior individual

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