The truth is that we are not perfect, we are vulnerable, and we all make mistakes. There is no question about that, but the real question is whether we can handle the truth, with credit to the writer of the movie “A Few Good Men.”
One of the toughest things that a manager may sometimes have to deal with is the lack of control over things. After all, traditionally management has been about control. Yet, managers, who are good at influencing others through good leadership and those who are good at controlling others through good management, sometimes cannot deal with their lack of control. They just struggle with the realities of life, only to find out that there is no other way than to face facts and live with them.
Managers and business leaders are humans after all. As much as they try to get things in order, there is no way they can get everything just perfect. Being perfect is actually against the human nature. We will make mistakes and we will face problems in the workplace. The important thing is to be ready to accept the inevitability of making mistakes.
Stress, in many cases, is a result of not being willing to accept that not everything is within one’s control. An employee who may not get the task done right, a colleague who stabs you in the back, a client who turns away from a deal he committed to you verbally are examples of inevitable things that are out of control.
However, when these things happen, it is up to the manager to decide how to deal with such situations. Let us look at two different scenarios of how a manager deals with problems or disappointments in the workplace.
One way to deal with this is to get hurt. Faced with a negative incident or failure at work, managers may allow these occurrences to affect them and hurt them personally so they get deeply disappointed and saddened by them. This way, they end up wasting precious time being saddened and occupied by these occurrences.
Others take their sorrow a step further to allow it to affect their psyche and attitude. They start changing their way of dealing with employees because one employee turned out to be a “bad apple,” at least in the eyes of the manager.
The other way to deal with this is to accept the fact that things did not go as one wished, but without allowing that to hurt his morale. Then, a manager can analyze what happened and see if there are any lessons learned from it, or how it can be avoided in the future. Finally, a manager decides to put this incident behind him as he moves forward after learning from that specific incident.
The managers in the examples above may have gone through similar experiences, but decided to deal with them differently. The first manager lost precious time and energy, focusing on his lack of control over the incident, while the second manager accepted the fact that these things are bound to happen, learned from the experience and moved on. Both managers will eventually move on. However, the first will do so after wasting energy and being negatively affected by what happened. The second learned from the experience and became a better and wiser manager before moving on.
The amazing part in all of this is that being manager type one or two (based on the above scenarios) is totally up to the manager. It is a matter of choice. Another ironic thing is that it is a choice to either hurt one’s self or to build one’s self. Looking at it at this abstract level, one wonders how he may ever allow his self to be negatively affected by such failures and problems at work. However, we all have done it, and probably most of us will continue to do it to in the future. However, the key is to try to take negative occurrences less personally, and accept the fact that these things simply happen.
Monday, March 5, 2007