Everyone makes mistakes.
Sometimes these mistakes are private, and sometimes they're very public.
Most are somewhere in between. Maybe your spouse sees it, or your team at work sees it.
The exposure goes up when you're taking on a higher level of responsibility, as with a group lead, project lead, or manager role. And missteps are all but guaranteed when you're in unfamiliar territory.
Email mistakes in a management position are just the start
Phil Roberts wrote about three real-life fails that new managers make. It's a concise read but if four minutes is still too much, here are the points:
- Err on the side of being more formal with most emails, and leave the casual / goofy emails outside of work.
- Get to the point and avoid long-winded stories.
- Understand the story before sending a response. Hasty responses can cause unnecessary confusion.
Guilty as charged for making all three of these mistakes.
But wait! There's more.
I'm not in a management position at the moment, but I have done developmental work assignments as both a project manager and a line manager.
I was a line manager for a little more than three months at the end of 2018, and that didn't go too badly (not mistake-free, but not horrible).
My project lead assignment was a different story, though. It was a few years earlier and I made a ton of mistakes with that one.
I was such a micromanager at one point that a key member of the team called me to the floor, and was ready to quit. I did a lot of thinking over the weekend and replayed the actions that led up to that breaking point. It ended up all right but it caused the team a lot of stress.
Reading about the downside of micromanaging didn't help
Before I took that assignment, I had read enough Dilbert comics to understand that micromanaging is bad.
It's a lot harder to recognize that you're micromanaging when you're in the middle of it. Others in the team had indicated that I was overstepping with the work products, but it took a key member unloading on me for me finally to see it.
At that time in my career, I had to learn that lesson the hard way.
We can't educate and study our way to a mistake-free life. We can avoid some of the bigger ones, sure, but not all of them.
The mistakes we make, and what we learn from them, are our own.
If we didn't make any mistakes, we wouldn't have anything worth sharing with others.
Suppose, for a second, that we didn't make mistakes. Then, it would follow that everything we had learned previously would have been sufficient to keep us from making mistakes.
In that case, though, what value can we add? What wisdom can we impart to others that can't be found elsewhere? We'd be rendered … unnecessary in that case.
The mistakes we've made, and what we've learned from them so as not to do them again, is where all of us can provide value to someone else.
Those parts of our skillsets are hard-earned … and valuable
My dad worked as a physicist at a Fortune 500 company for his entire career. He once told me that they wanted to hire PhDs because they had broken so much equipment working toward their thesis that they wouldn't break it on the job.
That's an oversimplification for sure, but it's clear that the mistakes and their lessons were valuable.
I've made mistakes in a lot of areas. Email marketing is another one of them. I'll share others as I go along.
Your mistakes classify you as human. Your mistakes, and the lessons you learned from them, are part of what make you you.
Your mistakes make up a part of you that can't be replicated, by AI or by anyone else.
Those mistakes are valuable in content, products, and coaching gigs. They're part of your unique selling proposition.
(Photo by George Becker on Pexels )