What You Do Next

When you make a mistake, there are only three things you should ever do about it: admit it, learn from it, and don’t repeat it.”

Coach Paul “Bear” Bryant

Mistakes are a part of life.  We all have made them. Some more than others, and some mistakes had higher consequences than others. But I have always believed what you do next is what really matters. To me it is what defines you as a person. The way you handle the mistake. The next action you make concerning that mistake.  The accountability, the ownership, the act of trying to make it right, or simply fixing it if you can.  It is what I have always practiced in my life, it is what I tried to instill in my children and encourage with my staff.   I make sure they know I will always have their back on any mistake if I know it has happened and they do the right thing as soon as they are aware.

In the IT industry the “what you do next” part of it is important. Mistakes can go many different directions and scales. No matter how much you automate, check, and review you still have the human nature to contend with, and humans are not perfect. Mistakes still happen.  Especially in today’s IT world of a mesh of hybrid multi-cloud environments with extraordinarily complex secure networks – which all means many more layers of hardware and configurations to touch.   Every precaution is taken on every change, but unfortunately human mistakes are a factor in IT.

Any mistake can impact at a very different level. Outages can occur costing major retailers or taxpayers millions by the minute, security breaches could happen jeopardizing personal data of thousands, a blip in the network could occur just causing an inconvenience, or we could simply fall a day behind on a project deadline. While a couple of those scenarios are worse than the others if they were caused by a human, what they do next is what matters.  Trying to cover it up, or not acknowledging it could lead to extended troubleshooting time, causing a longer outage or more resources researching costing unnecessary money and time.  If eventually discovered without the culprit coming forward that could be a reason to be terminated verses immediately acknowledging the mistake and moving on.   

Mistakes are always forgivable, if one has the courage to admit them.”

Bruce Lee

I interview a lot of IT resources, from project managers to developers and engineers, and one of my favorite interview questions is, “Tell me about a time where a mistake you made caused an issue, outage, or problem with a customer or project, what happened and what did you do next.”  You would be surprised how many of them answer at first that they do not have an example of how they directly caused an issue and often start telling me how they fixed someone else’s mistake. I obviously never let this go.  I know this cannot be true unless I am hiring someone new to the industry, which is rarely the case.

I know this because of experience. I have personally had my hands in too many servers, supported too many customers, ran too many projects, and managed too many IT teams.  I have never seen the perfect IT resource.  After all we are human. If you ever get a group of IT resources together that have been at it for 10+ years you often hear two type of stories being told like old war stories. The first is our favorite, “dumbest call ever”, think about the old jokes of the user calling the helpdesk saying their cup holder (aka cd drive) was not working anymore on their computer – we lived it. These are real stories folks!

The other “old war story” is always how many things we personally screwed up. We compare battle wounds and scars.  We laugh about our lessons learned and the mistakes we will hopefully never make again because we paid our dues. We did what was next for those mistakes and then did things like spend 42 hours on a conference call, spend days rebuilding 100 servers without sleep, painstakingly retraced cable in a freezing data center for 12 hours, reinstalled the same software 18 times, or rebuilt databases overnight.  For example…I once deleted a very popular hospitality agencies entire workforce call center database during their peak call time by mistake, or when running a project I was responsible for a major toy retailer .com site going down right before Christmas while I was sitting in front of their CTO – yikes!  Lessons you do not forget.  

In the interviews I push people to tell me their mistakes and how they handle them because it will directly tell me about their character. Those who immediately jump into a story about themselves will always get more points with me in the interview than those who try to go around the question.  I listen for key words on how they reported it, acted on it, fixed it, and learned from it.  Accountability and ownership are a huge part of what will make someone successful in the IT industry.  I often follow it with, what would you do differently. Because in the IT industry, it is not a matter of IF you will make a mistake, it is a matter of WHEN. What you do next is what is important. Learning from your lessons will make you better in this industry and really in everything you do.  

A person who never made a mistake never tried anything new.”

Albert Einstein

What you do next is not just important in the IT industry.  Life is full of chances to make mistakes. I know I have made my fair share. I do believe it is what you do next that defines the person not the mistake itself.  As a parent I have had to remind myself that on occasion with my kids, especially during their teen years. They are all adults now and still we have those conversations. They know they can come to me for help because I have stressed it is what they do next that matters.

Mistakes are not what makes a persons character, so I focus on what they do next. This often gives me a better avenue for communication with my staff as well. It helps them to know someone will support them and have their back when they admit the mistake.  What they do next is what matters.

Do you believe mistakes define a person? What do you encourage in others? What do you do next?