Friday, August 8, 2014

Taking responsibility, quickly and publicly

This week I had a learning moment that I'd like to reflect on. I'm particularly proud of the way one of my managers handled a problem that I learned from and that I'd like to share.

It all started late on Wednesday afternoon when I received a call from the campus legal counsel. Now usually, when a story starts with a call from legal counsel, that's a bad thing, and this certainly started badly. It appeared that a student had sent a message to all faculty on campus. The content of the message was inappropriate, although not in any sort of salacious way, but enough to generate some excitement. Since our email lists are moderated, we needed to figure out what had happened. Perhaps the student had broken into one of our systems? Impersonated one of our admins? Of course, it turns out to be much more simple than that. The student had followed process and requested that the message be sent to all faculty, a request that should have been denied, and one of my managers inadvertently approved it. Simple human error. Tons of drama.

So what did my manager do? He immediately contacted me and told me what had happened. He took full responsibility. No excuses. Didn't talk about how busy he is, or how bad the user interface is. He just said, I screwed up. He also noted the irony that he trains people on this interface and he routinely stresses to them to be eextremely careful and cautious, and then he didn't follow his own advice. And he told me that he learned that he needs to be careful and cautious too. He took full responsibility and he learned from it.

I was extremely impressed with his professionalism and his honesty and I told him so. You get a lot of credit for being honest, and a lot of respect. So I took his lesson and immediately applied it. I sent an email to the faculty, acknowledging the mistake and apologizing for it, within 24 hours of the initial email. I received several emails back from faculty thanking me for my honesty and leadership. I owned up to a mistake, something that doesn't happened that much, and I earned respect as a result. All in a days work.

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