Mistakes In Management

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By Jayde Ware

I am a perfectionist. I want to do things perfectly and I want to do them perfectly the first time. I want to excel in every aspect of my life, but excellence comes from trying, failing, learning, and trying again. One of the hardest chapters in my journey towards excellence was the first-time manager chapter. The chapter where I finally became the boss, but struggled because I wasn’t the perfect manager. That chapter has so far been the defining one in my career, not because of the job title, but because I’ve learned one of the most valuable lessons about work. I learned that perfection and management do not go hand and hand. There is no perfect manager. There are simply good managers, bad managers, and great managers. What sets the three apart is the ability to learn from their mistakes. And I sure did make a lot of them, but nothing has been as trans-formative as these four.

Being too nice. I walked into my first management position determined to be nice. I wanted to prove that a boss could be both fierce and kind. I wanted to excel in my position without being the boss that everyone breathed a sigh of relief when I wasn’t at work. I didn’t want to be like the long list of women in management I had seen before. Women who were brilliant in business, but cold and disliked. I had been the nice girl my entire life, so I was determined to continue being that.

I was uncomfortable writing staff up for blatant policy violations, so I didn’t. I didn’t like firing people, so I allowed staff who were hurting the company to stay and I did my best to put band-aids over the hurt. I overlooked attendance issues and picked up the slack for missed deadlines. I didn’t hold my staff accountable for anything. And I was loved for this. I succeeded at being the cool boss, but I failed at being an effective manager. While I was the nice boss to my staff, my boss didn’t care that I was loved, she cared that my department was failing.

I am a firm believer in working hard and being nice to people. I’ve always believed that nice girls finish first, but it’s important to realize that being the nice girl and being an effective manager don’t always mix. Being too nice will win you people’s love, but it will not win you respect at work and respect is essential to true leadership. You can be nice without being a pushover.

Not resting. When you step into a management role, it is easy for it to consume your entire life. When you take responsibility for your department, whether it wins or fails falls on your shoulders. When you become the boss, your team’s problems become yours to solve. That’s a lot of weight to carry around, but it’s important to unload that burden when you go home. After all, strong shoulders get tired too. It’s easy to become obsessed with being the best manager. It’s easy to get wrapped up in to do lists, problem solving, and putting any work fires out. The hard part isn’t doing the work, it’s pulling yourself away from it.

I immersed myself in every aspect of my first management position. I arrived at work before everyone else, worked through lunch, and stayed hours after everyone else had gone home. I came in to the office on my days off, took piles of work home with me, and even responded to emails until the moment I shut my eyes for bed. Work became my life. I was excelling at work, but the rest of my life was falling apart. I was eating, breathing, and sleeping my job. I missed birthdays and celebrations for 30 more minutes at my desk and those 30 more minutes often turned into hours.

I loved what I did, so I didn’t mind. I kept up with the early mornings, skipped lunches, and long nights for months before the burn out hit. The burn out hit and I went from being the first one in the office to being late to everything. I went from skipping lunch to needing more time on my lunch break just to finish the rest of the work day. It took me months to recover and I realized that you can love what you do and still burn out. You must learn to take breaks for you.

Put the phone down, turn off those email notifications, disconnect. Work can wait until the morning. Those emails can wait. Your life cannot. The people you love cannot. The people you care about cannot keep waiting for you to become present in their lives again. You cannot keep waiting for you to become present in your own life again. Disconnect and rest. Rest for you.

Not delegating. You know the old saying “if you want something done right, do it yourself?” well.. that may apply to other aspects of life, but it does not apply to management. I was used to just doing everything myself in order to ensure it was done up to my standards, but I quickly learned that is not how management works. Your job, as the manager, is to delegate duties and responsibilities to your staff and ensure that they have the direction and the resources to perform their jobs well. As a manager, you must have faith that the people you hired can do their jobs and do them well. You cannot do it all and do it all well. You cannot be an expert of everything, that is why you have a team. Teams thrive from trust and building on strengths and weaknesses. You cannot manage an effective team if don't trust everyone to do their part. And that trust, starts with delegation.

Not taking ownership. One of the biggest mistakes I’ve made is not taking ownership. I would take accountability for my mistakes and shortcomings as manager, but I failed to take the same accountability for my team’s. As a manager, you must own your department, all of it. You own the mistakes, the failures, and the successes. You own the good, the bad, and the outright ugly. You own the actions of your team, their problems, and the solutions to those problems. You own it all. People don’t lose respect for making mistakes, they lose respect when you fail to own up to those mistakes.

As a manager, you must own your department, all of it. You own the mistakes, the failures, the wins, the losses, and everything in between. They are yours. You do not get to pick and choose when to take accountability and when to place blame on someone else. When you sit in the manager chair, you own it. Some days this will be easy and others it will be the hardest thing you'll do, but teams win and lose together and as the team captain, you take ownership of the results.

I am still a perfectionist, but my journey in management has taught me to silence the parts of myself that can’t accept mistakes. Mistakes will always be uncomfortable, but they’ll always be our best teachers.  I will always hate making mistakes, but I am human and I know that I will make thousands more in my career and I’ll learn something new with each one. Some will be easy to laugh at, others will sting for a while, and others will be the catalyst for transformation periods in my life and how I go about business.

 I welcome them now. I expect to mess up. And you should too. Because you will mess up a million times. You will make mistakes and if you're anything like me, you'll beat yourself up for those mistakes. Give yourself a break. You are human and humans make mistakes. Just remember that your mess ups and mishaps do not define you. You are not the mistakes you make. The trick is to make mistakes, learn, and then make better mistakes.